I actually really feel this. Before I retired I had a homelab in the learning, testing, experimenting sense. I didn't run anything for home "production" on it because the downtime wasn't appreciated.
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
It is a bit of a shame, IMO, that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out, or maybe never even really caught on. A sort of digital shadow of the house, it could run a home email server and do any home automation/content hosting.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
> that the concept of an always-on home computer has basically died out
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
Back in the day you set up a homelab with enterprise level hardware so that you could gain experience on hardware and platforms you otherwise wouldn't have access to. Cisco firewalls, VMWare Hypervisors, vSan, etc.
It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
Yeah I've posted a few times here and there that selfhosting and homelabbing are different concepts with different goals. You might use the same hardware but what solutions you choose will differ based on your goals.
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
Went to the site pricetracker.wtf, tried one example search and Cloudflare blocked me. Before that it gave a few 500 errors. Cloudflare Ray ID: 957b4f2ee9b40b9c
I'm in the homeprod camp. The lab is on the other side of the room with the scope etc. Although come to think of it most of the electronics I do these days is fixing things, so maybe that should be considered production too. argh.
A perfect example of creating problems out of nowhere. Does OP have nothing productive to say other than dunking on the term? Since when does "homelab" resemble to anything concrete?
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
Well, I have nothing productive to say; overthinking nomenclature is probably even counterproductive. But I was actually quite curious to know if there are people like me who self host but don't use their setups primarily for experimentation or learning, and how they refer to their setup.. :)
I want to say thanks for the post. I hadn't considered this before, but now it makes me really wish we had a different term in common use.
I definitely tend to think of networking labs, of things meant for short term use & experimentation, but many of us really enjoy & rely on these systems serving our homes, our lives, reliably, consistently. I've heard some defenses of labs, but rarely is a lab doing the same reliable work again and again and again at a lab; labs feel like forerunners, not established bedrock.
Some day I really hope home servers cross the chasm, become more and more accepted & common. I know there's so many countervailing reasons, conveniences that keep this unlikely, but still I hope some folks find reason & find it not hard to back off from big cloud, to find advantage in running things ourselves.
There's the well known home-ops repo & folks. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops among techies I've seen some lightbulbs go off by calling the system a home-cloud. I'm curious what other nomenclature people have seen used, and how they feel it's been received?
in europe you can not have haphazardly build electricity system without calling it "lab". (you need electrician to do your electricity work, but calling it "lab" you can do it yourself )
so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great.
look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI cluster" etc. so i would argue that nonresistance to these farces actually proves OP is right. albeit i do not really see strong nor attacking rhetoric from OP in his post either, so i think problem is just that you have to chill out ;)
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days... so even american president has to say something about it, so i think there is something to it, dont you think ?
Seriously, this! OP has a LAN with a server(s) running local services. A home lab isn’t for them and that’s fine. They obviously recognize that others like to call their local setup a home lab. At an institution, it would be called a computer lab and has been since they’ve been around. Businesses have various names (closet, colo, noc, etc.) but they’re all servers and networking infrastructure. Maybe gear is the deciding factor. A home lab would more likely use professional gear where if you’re merely self-hosting with SOHO gear, it’s just a LAN. No lab needed.
I call it my "homeprod" - but then, what happens if your infra spans multiple sites, and the cloud? Then it's just "prod" at that point. Probably best to just call it your "personal infra / servers", or if you have a family, "family servers".
I present an alternate etymology for homelab. Instead of "lab" as experimentation space, think of it as lab: place for doing work. Away back in the day we didn't have laptops to work on university CS classes.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
I call it my deprod, or home office nonproductivity suite. Or fire hazard. Or “those f**ing wires”. I’ll usually refer to just a piece of it, like “my computer”, “my weird ARM switch”, or “that engineering sample that a guy sold me at the Flea for $10 and still hasn’t died after 5 years of being on”.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
dont be such a sook. if you're not making money off it, its a homelab.
If its just infrastucure to run your house its then you wouldnt be blogging about it.
your about says:
Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
I definitely have a homelab, though I’ve tried to keep mine concealed and out of the way. It’s fairly reliable, but so overkill I wouldn’t want to talk to loudly about it in fear that people would burst my tiny little bubble of justification.
I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 85.9 ms ] threadDoesn't quite role off the tongue though, not even a good acronym. Maybe Personal Data Centre (pdc)?
There's some cross over with r/selfhosted but that generally includes people hosting things on VPS/Bare metal.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See: https://youtu.be/l2ThMmgQdpE
Now I have a more capable rack, but it's all just running stuff I use. I don't experiment on it at all, and I don't use it to gain any new skills.
So I do call it a homelab, but its not quite what people understand that to be.
Anyway, I think it is unusual enough that it will need describing whatever he calls it, so no need to stress about the name. I’d call it the home computer, haha. Every computer is actually a network of chips anyway nowadays, this one is just physically much larger I guess.
On a related note, I'm enjoying the Self-Host Weekly newsletter[0], which is full of random open source self-hosting products.
[0] https://selfh.st/weekly/2025-06-27/
I just don't see where it would fit into my life. I used to have an old desktop computer that I'd co-opted into an OpenBSD switch living on top of a cupboard when I was 19 or so, and it was a fun experiment for about a year, when the tiny amount of extra hassle it provided with the almost zero amount of extra benefit meant one day it was switched off and was never turned back on again.
Hosting anything seems like a good way to attract attention from my broadband provider who I'd rather just thought of me as a faceless number, Apple has turned my two Apple TVs into home-automation devices I never think about, and I can spin up a $5 VPS whenever.
The remaining utility is the lab, though. A set of computers I can break without worrying I've lost my email or my lights no longer work properly.
Everyone has prod; some also have dev.
1. No fault tolerance or high availability
2. It can evaporate just as quickly as it formed
3. Same contents as the cloud (plus some local contaminants)
On a serious note: I wish more of the homelab community was focused on self-hosting (puddles should be awesome!), but it seems to mostly be folks justifying the purchase of large amounts of used equipment for “education” (internet points).
It got rid of all of my wiring mess since 90% of my networked stuff just lives together and now uses a single UPS. It's also relatively easy to move from place to place as I move apartments. Also, enterprise equipment just works better. After a few Comcast failures during meetings I now have a 5G failover; I also firewall corporate laptops from the rest of my home equipment to prevent any unwanted spying.
For instance, I'd argue homelabbing with Kubernetes makes sense, selfhosting with Kubernetes is stupid. Because the only reason you should ever run that at home is practice for work.
I took from the article that the term homelab makes it sound like the use case is trite, hobbyist or not serious.
I have one at home, too, running pricetracker.wtf, among other things.
It has a 56G network switch i will never be able to saturate, more compute than i'll probably need.
Looking to add 24 disk JBOD - i will never probably saturate or fill either.
Email in profile. Please reach out
Edit: Looking at your "de-googling" post, which resembles a lot of privacy theatre, this just seems like nothing more than an attention grab
I definitely tend to think of networking labs, of things meant for short term use & experimentation, but many of us really enjoy & rely on these systems serving our homes, our lives, reliably, consistently. I've heard some defenses of labs, but rarely is a lab doing the same reliable work again and again and again at a lab; labs feel like forerunners, not established bedrock.
Some day I really hope home servers cross the chasm, become more and more accepted & common. I know there's so many countervailing reasons, conveniences that keep this unlikely, but still I hope some folks find reason & find it not hard to back off from big cloud, to find advantage in running things ourselves.
There's the well known home-ops repo & folks. https://github.com/onedr0p/home-ops among techies I've seen some lightbulbs go off by calling the system a home-cloud. I'm curious what other nomenclature people have seen used, and how they feel it's been received?
so in that sense i agree that homelab is just another hijacked term to allow people do nonproductive nonsense just to feel great.
look you have people here and on youtube selling (in more ways then one) nonsensical farces like "RPI cluster" etc. so i would argue that nonresistance to these farces actually proves OP is right. albeit i do not really see strong nor attacking rhetoric from OP in his post either, so i think problem is just that you have to chill out ;)
"degoogling" cost canada their sovereignty. just to refer to events of the past days... so even american president has to say something about it, so i think there is something to it, dont you think ?
Agreed.
It's still a homelab, the author just doesn't seem to like the term.
So you had to go to the lab to find a computer beefy enough to do your work on.
It's not a home "lab for experimentation.".
It's a home "lab for getting work done."
However in my case it definitely is a homelab, as I am always tinkering with it and the router/server ratio is way to high.
I use it to decompress. Sometimes, even, to learn. And always, for personal projects.
your about says: Hi! I’m Neeraj Adhikari. I work as a software engineer. I love free and open-source software, care about data privacy and dabble in self-hosting.
which tends to indicate a degree of "labbing".. if it wasnt and you were treating it like a fridge or a washing machine, you wouldn't be "dabbling" in it. you'd be installing it then not bothering to mention you have.
I do have a really cool washing machine from Miele that has a cartridge system in the bottom so that I don’t have to measure out detergent by hand. Just press a button.
But I’m not OP.