How to explain homelabbing to your family
I recently started a new and exciting hobby: building a homelab and self-hosting. This gave me a renewed sense of excitement about technology and helped relieve my career burnout. If you’re one of my friends whom I recently convinced to start a homelab, I ’m sorry (not really). You are about to join many others in experiencing a hobby that is fun, tiresome, but deeply rewarding.
As a software engineer, why one would want a homelab is pretty obvious to me. But this wasn’t easy to explain to my wife. We tried to find online articles that explained some of the benefits, but nothing really stood out. I figured that other homelabbers will face this issue too, so I’ve set out to write a blog post to help explain my new hobby to my family.
Homelab and Self Hosting
A homelab is simply a collection of computer hardware, networking gear, and other machines you experiment with at home. In a way, it’s also a mindset. You might run a few virtual machines on your gaming PC, repurpose an old laptop as a server, or go all the way to data-center-grade hardware in the garage.
While testing hardware is fun, many homelabbers use their setup to run apps they want to use. You can access those apps over your local network or the internet. This was the original purpose of the internet, connecting computers together so people can share data and services. When you use Netflix or Instagram, you’re really connecting to their computers over the network. With a homelab, you can self-host your own apps and data on your own servers for you and your family to use.
Taking back ownership
In the modern age, more and more services are shifting to subscription models, which means we often pay continuously without ever truly owning what we rely on. Many people have already felt this with cloud storage: if you can’t keep paying for something like iCloud, you could lose access to important data like photos and documents.
More recently, there’s another kind of ownership loss: unwanted features that get baked into the apps we depend on and can’t be fully disabled (for example, Meta AI in WhatsApp). These additions can change how a product behaves, how your data is handled, and what you’re forced to interact with, without your consent.
Self-hosting and open-source tools shift that power back to you. You choose what runs, what updates, and what stays the same. The trade-off is responsibility. You may have to upgrade or maintain things yourself, and if a project is abandoned, you might need to maintain or replace it. But at least the choice is yours, not a billion-dollar company’s.
Artisanship leads to appreciation
The hallmark of modern software is that we expect it to be easy to use and abundant to the point of overwhelming. It is easy to pay for a few subscriptions to apps you never truly use because you haven’t taken the effort to tailor them to your needs.
But when you invest the effort to tune tools to your needs, you become more engaged, and far more likely to use them every day. That’s been my experience with self-hosting: my apps have become a regular part of my routine, while I’ve previously paid for similar services that I barely touched.
Learning the whole stack
Building a homelab is also a way to learn and understand systems in a way many modern jobs don’t allow. As a professional engineer, you’re often working behind abstraction layers like the cloud or Kubernetes. In a homelab, you are forced to learn and understand the full stack from hardware to the operating system and network. I’ve even had to revisit electrical safety recently to make sure I can run my machines responsibly without burning down the house.
Building a homelab is fun
Most importantly, building a homelab is fun! People choose technical careers because they enjoy tinkering and playing with technology. But at work you don’t have the freedom to explore or experiment. You must meet deadlines, build what the customer / company needs, and prioritize the stability of your applications. Unfortunately, this takes away the thing that made us enjoy this career in the first place. Homelab offers you a chance to do that again.