HomeLabSpot

Run your own stack. Keep your own data.

Practical guides for the stack you run yourself — backups, media, monitoring, remote access. Every post lists the hardware, the version and the command that failed first.

Browse tutorials What I run this on

Three ways in

10 guides

Tutorials

Step-by-step guides for Docker, backups, reverse proxies and the rest of a small stack.

 3 guides

Comparisons

Two tools, same job. Here is where each one is faster, cheaper, or more annoying.

 3 guides

Reviews

What a tool is like once the novelty wears off and the updates start breaking things.

Latest

Backblaze B2 as a Backup Target: 18 Months, $19 Total

What B2 actually costs for a restic repository, where the bill comes from, and the three things the S3-compatible API will not do for you.

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Recently published

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Comparison

Gitea vs Forgejo: Same Code, Different Owners

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, and the difference is governance as much as features. What that means for a self-hosted git server you plan to keep.

5 min read

Comparison

Caddy vs Nginx for a Home Lab Reverse Proxy

Both terminate TLS and route traffic. The difference is how much config you maintain and what breaks at 2am — tested side by side for three months.

6 min read

Who writes this

Henry Xiang

I keep self-hosted services alive for a living — backups, docs, monitoring, the boring parts that break at 3am. Everything here runs on my own hardware first.

Everything here is tested on a 1L mini PC running Proxmox, plus a Debian 13 VM. No sponsored verdicts, no review copies unless the post says so.