My Tech Stack

Self-Hosting: Why Bother?

There are plenty of reasons to self-host—avoiding subscription fees, maintaining control over your data, or just having fun experimenting with different applications. Personally, I enjoy spinning up servers just to try out random applications I’ll probably never use.

Recently, I attempted to self-host Wazuh, an open-source security platform. Unfortunately, I ran into issues between the keyboard and chair (yes, user error), so that project didn’t quite pan out. That said, I still rely on some cloud services, as my home infrastructure isn’t robust enough to handle everything.

A major limitation? Networking. Most of the switches in my parents’ house are unmanaged and daisy-chained together—an absolute nightmare. On top of that, they’re still using a 2016 Netgear modem/router that struggles to keep up. I’ve been trying to convince them to upgrade, but that’s a battle for another day. Networking is a whole topic on its own, and I’ll cover that another time.

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My Tech Stack: What’s Running?

My current tech stack runs on a Proxmox cluster—or rather, a Proxmox duo (since calling two nodes a “cluster” feels wrong). Clusters generally work better with odd numbers, but here we are.

Both nodes run nearly identical setups:

• A single Ubuntu VM on each node.
• Each VM runs Docker to manage applications.
• Yes, it’s host-ception—a host running a host running a host running containers.

A diagram of my tech stack, made in Draw.io.

Core Components:

1. Pi-hole + Recursive DNS Resolver:
   • Each node runs Pi-hole, syncing via rsync.
   • I forked this script to use an identity file for secure SSH-based syncing.
   • This setup ensures all local hosts can be resolved via A records.
2. Nginx Reverse Proxy + Cloudflare DNS:
   • My domains are managed through Cloudflare (their support is a horror story, but their services are top-notch).
   • I use DNS challenges to generate local SSL certificates, eliminating annoying HTTPS warnings.
   • Having proper domain names makes accessing services seamless.

These two services are the backbone of my home lab. I’d love to make them highly available, but hardware limitations prevent that—for now.

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Expanding the Stack: Future Plans

I recently set up a three-node Raspberry Pi 5 cluster running K3s. I’m not fully confident in my Kubernetes skills yet, but I plan to migrate some services there over time.

Other notable services I’m running:

• A MariaDB database for my senior capstone project.
• A WireGuard LXC for remote home network access.
• My capstone project, which auto-updates via GitHub CI/CD & Watchtower.

I’d love to throw everything under the sun into my homelab, but resource allocation is tricky. Each node has 32GB of RAM, and while my total storage is 2TB, I’m only using ~1.1TB. Eventually, I’ll implement a better resource management system.

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Long-Term Goals

In the future, I plan to:
✅ Run highly available applications (likely on better hardware).
✅ Upgrade to modern, power-efficient servers—my current HP EliteDesks claim 35W TDP, but I’m skeptical.
✅ Get a powerful server for running LLMs (because why not?).

My Raspberry Pi 5s are surprisingly efficient—quad-core, 8GB RAM, and only 15W power draw. However, they can’t run Proxmox, which is a limitation for my use case.

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Where to Find Self-Hosted Applications

If you’re looking for cool self-hosted apps, check out Awesome-Selfhosted. It’s a massive, well-maintained list of free and non-free software for homelabs.

I also follow homelab YouTubers—but fair warning, their setups are dangerously inspiring. One minute you’re watching a video, the next you’re impulse-buying rack-mounted servers on eBay.

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Thanks for reading! I’ll keep sharing updates on what I’m building and learning in my homelab. Stay tuned!