Practical homelab builds for infrastructure engineers. This is where enterprise skills meet kit you can actually afford. Guides cover mini PC clusters, refurbished Dell and HPE servers, Proxmox hypervisor setups, network segmentation with VLANs, and the power and cooling tradeoffs that matter when you run 24/7 at home. Every build documented here has either sat in a production rack or a real spare bedroom. No theoretical gear lists, no affiliate filler. If you want to learn Kubernetes on a £120 refurbished OptiPlex or run a dozen self-hosted services on a Pi cluster, start here. The homelab is a professional development environment, and this is how we treat it.
I monitor 30+ services across my homelab with Uptime Kuma. It has saved me from silent failures more times than I can count, and it takes about five minutes to deploy. Here is how to set it up properly. From the homelab: Uptime Kuma monitors every service I run — over 30 endpoints across multiple
How to Install Uptime Kuma to Monitor Your Homelab (2026 Guide) Read More »
TL;DR: Refurbished Dell OptiPlex Micro, HP ProDesk Mini, and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny units are the best value for homelab hardware in 2026. Look for 7th-gen Intel or newer, DDR4 RAM, and budget £100-250 for a solid setup. These beat new hardware on price and run Proxmox beautifully. With DDR5 prices through the roof, buying new
Best Refurbished Mini PCs for Your Homelab in 2026 Read More »
Let me be honest upfront: running Kubernetes on a single Raspberry Pi is over-engineered. For running a few containers, Docker Compose is simpler, lighter, and more appropriate. If your goal is purely practical — get services running with minimum fuss — you don’t need Kubernetes. That’s not the point. The point is that Kubernetes is
K3s: Real Kubernetes on a Raspberry Pi Read More »
Build Real Infrastructure. Land Real Jobs. Every DevOps job posting asks for “production experience.” But how do you get production experience without a production job? The homelab. From the homelab: Everything in this series comes from my own infrastructure. I run a Proxmox cluster, a Pi rack, and 30+ self-hosted services. Each guide is something
Homelab Guides 2026 | Build Enterprise Skills on Any Budget Read More »
Built for people who are learning networking the real way: by breaking stuff, fixing it, and doing it again. From the field: I have seen engineers push a full /16 network for a single web service because it was the default in the Azure template they cloned. Understanding IP addressing is not optional, it is
IP Addressing Explained: Public vs Private, Subnetting & Interview Questions Read More »
The UK, US, Australia, EU and Canada all publish cybersecurity frameworks with the same five controls. If you run a homelab, you already practise all five – not because you studied a framework, but because things break if you don’t.
5 Security Basics Your Homelab Already Teaches You Read More »
Published on 25 February 2026 | Homelab / Career | 10 min read The Question That Started This I’ve been interviewing infrastructure engineers on and off for the best part of a decade. Mostly Azure and AWS roles – cloud architects, platform engineers, DevOps leads. The kind of people who should know how the internet
Why Your Homelab Makes You a Better Cloud Architect Read More »
Published on 25 February 2026 | Homelab / Self-Hosting | 12 min read Right, so you’ve got Docker running on a spare PC or a Raspberry Pi. Maybe you followed a YouTube tutorial, maybe you just winged it. Either way – now what? I’ve been running a homelab for a few years now, and honestly,
5 Containers Every Homelab Should Run (2026) Read More »
Your Homelab Doesn’t Need to Live at Home The 2026 RAM crisis has made physical hardware painfully expensive. DDR5 prices have gone through the roof, and even DDR4 is climbing. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to own hardware to run a homelab. Cloud VPS services offer free tiers and budget options that rival
Best VPS for Homelabs in 2026: Free Tiers and Budget Options Read More »
