So You Want to Start a Homelab?

By Seth Sanders | 12-Year IT Systems Engineer & Systems Administrator Veteran

Whenever friends, coworkers, or people breaking into IT find out I run a homelab, the most common question I get isn't about Kubernetes clusters, ZFS storage arrays, or enterprise server racks.

It’s always the exact same four words: "Where do I start?"

My answer usually catches them off guard: Start somewhere. Anywhere. And build from there.

The Paralysis of Infinite Possibilities

If you spend ten minutes on r/homelab, tech Twitter, or YouTube, it’s easy to feel instantly overwhelmed. You’ll see pristine, color-coded server racks glowing in custom-built basement closets, drawing enough power to heat a small home. It looks intimidating, expensive, and completely out of reach.

So, people get paralyzed. They wonder:

Should I learn Proxmox or bare-metal Ubuntu first?
Do I need a $500 NAS before I start hoarding data?
Is a Raspberry Pi actually fast enough to run anything useful?

The truth? None of that matters when you're on step zero.

The biggest secret in self-hosting is that almost everyone with an elaborate rack setup today started with an old laptop on a nightstand or a dusty Raspberry Pi taped to the back of their router.

Start With Whatever Is In Arm's Reach

You don't need a corporate budget or a computer science degree to start self-hosting. You just need a single piece of hardware capable of running an operating system.

Got $35 and a spare Raspberry Pi? Fantastic. You can set up Pi-hole to block advertisements across your entire home network, or turn it into a custom graphics dashboard that displays traffic alerts, server stats, or weather updates.
Have an old office desktop sitting in a closet? Perfect. Throw Linux or a hypervisor like Proxmox on it, slap in a couple of hard drives, and you suddenly have a sandbox to test virtual machines, practice scripting, or host a media center.
Only have an old laptop with a broken screen? Even better—it has a built-in battery backup (UPS) already attached!

The goal isn't perfection—it's momentum. Every time you break a configuration file, spend two hours figuring out why network ports aren't communicating, or successfully access a web app hosted in your own living room, you learn something a textbook or video course can never teach you.

The Sandbox Mindset: Embrace the Wipe Button

When you start out, your homelab is purely an experimental sandbox. There are no users submitting frantic support tickets, no SLAs, and no boss breathing down your neck if a service crashes.

Because it isn't serving your daily life yet, it's built to be built, torn down, and rebuilt.

Total rebuilds are where the real learning happens. I frequently tear down experimental setups and completely rebuild them with a whole new software stack just to try new things, master new principles, and have fun building. Every time you wipe a drive and start over, you refine your deployment process and build confidence. Treat every drive on your learning machine as temporary, and embrace the wipe button as your best teaching tool.

A Critical Warning: Don't Treat a Sandbox Like Production

That freedom to tear things down relies on one strict rule: never store important documents, irreplaceable family photos, or your primary media collection on a learning server.

It’s very tempting early on to start moving your real digital life onto a new server the moment it boots. Resist that urge! Until you have spent time learning the environment—and built a rock-solid, tested backup strategy—assume anything stored on your lab machine can disappear in a second.

Eventually, as your skills grow, you might build out a permanent "production" setup that runs real household services and stores real data. But in the beginning, keep your real data far away while you take the time to learn and experiment safely.

Step 1: Start on Bare Metal (The Foundation)

If you have an old workstation, laptop, or mini PC sitting around, skip the complex hypervisors and server setups on day one. Start at the absolute foundation: Install bare-metal Linux.

Grab a USB flash drive, download an ISO of Ubuntu Server, and install it directly onto the hardware.

Go Headless First: Don't install a desktop interface right away. Force yourself to interact with the machine over SSH (command line) from your main computer. Learning how to navigate directories, manage system services, check system logs, and edit configuration files using terminal editors like nano or vim builds a foundation of muscle memory that pays dividends for the rest of your IT career.
Add a GUI Later: Once you feel comfortable moving around the terminal, install a desktop environment (like GNOME or XFCE) onto that same machine. Seeing how a Linux desktop interface differs from Windows or macOS—and understanding how the GUI sits on top of the underlying terminal core—instantly demystifies how Linux operating systems actually function.

Step 2: Your First Application (e.g., Plex on Bare Metal)

Once your base OS is running, pick one simple service to host. Media servers like Plex or Jellyfin are classic starting points because they provide immediate, tangible results: you get to stream your own media files to your phone, tablet, or TV.

Resist the urge to jump straight into complex deployment methods here. Install Plex directly on bare metal.

Run the installer package manually, configure your media folders, manage system permissions so the application can read your storage drives, and open the necessary firewall ports. By doing this directly on the host system, you learn:

How Linux users and permission groups work (chmod and chown).
Where application logs and configuration files live on disk.
How to manage background system services using systemctl.

Hold Off on Containers (For Now)

It is extremely tempting to jump straight into Docker or Portainer on day one. Modern self-hosting tutorials love to say, "Just paste this single Docker Compose file and you're done!"

While Docker is an essential tool that you should learn eventually, using it too early can hinder your fundamental learning.

Docker abstracts away almost all the hard work. It bundles dependencies, manages user permissions under the hood, and isolates networking automatically. If something goes wrong—or when you eventually need to troubleshoot a complex network routing issue—you won't understand why it broke because you never learned how the underlying dependencies interact on bare metal.

Master bare metal first, learn where files and dependencies live, and then move to containerized apps.

Step 3: Graduate to a Hypervisor

Once you’ve installed an OS on bare metal and deployed an application or two manually, you’ll naturally hit a limit: you'll want to run multiple isolated systems without needing to buy a separate physical computer for every single project.

This is where you graduate to a Type-1 Hypervisor like Proxmox VE or ESXi/XCP-ng.

Wipe that bare-metal Linux installation (remember: don't be afraid to tear it down!) and install a hypervisor directly onto the bare hardware. Now, your single old workstation becomes a host capable of spinning up dozens of independent Virtual Machines (VMs) with a few clicks:

Spin up VM 1: A dedicated Linux server for your Plex media setup.
Spin up VM 2: A playground to practice bash scripting or test Linux configurations.
Spin up VM 3: A Windows Server trial instance to practice Active Directory and domain networking.

Just Press Power

Stop overthinking the "ideal" setup, the perfect hardware, or the ultimate network topology.

Grab whatever hardware you can afford, scavenge, or borrow, pick one small project, and get your hands dirty. The best homelab isn't the one with the most expensive rack in the basement—it's the one that gets you building today.