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.
Below is the shopping / build sheet for the Raspberry Pi Cluster project From the homelab: I built a Pi cluster for running lightweight services — monitoring, DNS, and a K3s Kubernetes playground. Here is the exact shopping list I used, with notes on what is worth spending on and where to save. Some variables […]
PiCluster – Build Shopping List Read More »
Forget expensive racks. Your homelab journey starts with old hardware, cloud credits, and a little curiosity. Here’s how to build your first lab in 2025.
How to Build Your First Homelab (2025 Edition) Read More »
Hands-on beats theory. A homelab is your personal playground for learning tech the real way — and it can launch your career.
What is a Homelab — and Why Do You Need One? Read More »
ReadTheManual is the homelab-to-enterprise translation layer for the Technical Climber. Lab to Leader, Ballet to Combat, real projects mapped to real career value. No gatekeeping, just the guides we wished existed when we were climbing.
Welcome to ReadTheManual: Day One of Something Big Read More »
