03-11-2025, 05:31 PM
Earlier in my career, I definitely had a homelab. At one point, I had an APC half-rack enclosure and 6 rackmount servers. But as I've gotten older, and value my time more preciously than when I was younger, I've gotten away from running much at all at home anymore.
I do maintain a small footprint of VPS systems in the cloud, used to run things such as this website, the IRC bot, my wife's business stuff, and a few other personal things. But at home, there isn't much at all anymore. My wife and oldest have a laptop, I have my PC and my work laptop. A couple of tablets and such floating around. After my move last year, I'm even running on the ISP-provided WiFi6 router. No servers, no raspberry pi's. I did have a few cameras, but have not yet remounted any here after the move.
What I find is that I'm completely free from dealing with tech issues when I'm not at work. Aside from small things that everyone has to deal with - these are computers after all - I am not spending my nights or weekends dealing with some self-inflicted issue with my homelab setup. I spent countless hours doing such in the past, but I just don't see it being worth it for me anymore. Instead of spending non-working hours fixing the same kind of things I get paid (or used to get paid) to fix, I can spend it on hobbies. Gaming. Family.
I do still lose some time on personal projects, like the IRC bot and website and these forums, but it's pretty minimal and I enjoy it. And if you enjoy homelabbing, I say go for it!
I do maintain a small footprint of VPS systems in the cloud, used to run things such as this website, the IRC bot, my wife's business stuff, and a few other personal things. But at home, there isn't much at all anymore. My wife and oldest have a laptop, I have my PC and my work laptop. A couple of tablets and such floating around. After my move last year, I'm even running on the ISP-provided WiFi6 router. No servers, no raspberry pi's. I did have a few cameras, but have not yet remounted any here after the move.
What I find is that I'm completely free from dealing with tech issues when I'm not at work. Aside from small things that everyone has to deal with - these are computers after all - I am not spending my nights or weekends dealing with some self-inflicted issue with my homelab setup. I spent countless hours doing such in the past, but I just don't see it being worth it for me anymore. Instead of spending non-working hours fixing the same kind of things I get paid (or used to get paid) to fix, I can spend it on hobbies. Gaming. Family.
I do still lose some time on personal projects, like the IRC bot and website and these forums, but it's pretty minimal and I enjoy it. And if you enjoy homelabbing, I say go for it!
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