Homelab 01: my journey

This is the start of documenting my homelab journey... I have been self hosting some to most of my data over the past 10 Years!

Written by T1G3R.dev, 2026-06-05

Lets see where I am at right now? Lately I decided to move away from GitHub in my effort to leave all proprietary services behind… After looking at alternatives like Codeberg i decided, especially for my private projects, a self hosted git service would be the best joice.

Why self hosting?

Eaven though there are plenty of free to use Git servers like Github or Codeberg, they have their disadvantages. Maximum file sizes for example. Also data ownership and privacy, especially when hosting sensitive information, gets an interesting factor. In a world where AI gets trained on every available information, probably eaven this post, having control over your data gets more and more important!

How I started?

I started expirementing with tech in my early teens. My first projects were websites written entirely in pure html… Over the weeks and months CSS and JavaScript entered the mix. But I wanted more! While client side scripts could still be run in the browser from local files, when I started needing PHP and databases a small serverseemed the only option bat the time. Nowadays i would tell you, of course you can still run this on your local machine, but back then I didn’t konw any better and making my Website available 24/7 and to everyone seemed like the next step anyway:)

So I started self hosting on a raspberry Pi, a way I still can recommend to everyone who wants to start in an well documented or doesn’t have an old pc or laptop laying around.

The first app

Of course besides hosting my own website, soon I stumbled upon pre packaged web apps with their purpose, I mainly started hosting Nextcloud on my Pi3 later on a Pi4. But the performance didn’t really allow for much more…

The Server and then containers and/or docker

After a few years with my trusty PIs and still a few webpages and the Nextcloud on bare metal, all without a reverse proxy, containers i wanted to upgrade.

I went for a self built Ryzen 5 build and 2 HDDs in RAID 1. After a look around different Distros (I was already locked in on LINUX) i decided on Proxmox as my host system. To this day im still unsure why they don’t built their own docker management integration, since that’s one of the few problems I have with it.

Proxmox comes with a full webmanagement for VMs and LXC Containers.

I started using a reverse proxy and ported all my installs.

Over the past 4 years I have been managing this Server, I have installed many services (around 40 :/) but only a few stuck around:). But they are a topic for another day.

So forgejo and git.t1g3r.dev now?

Yes, after launching this website this year and hosting my own mail server, I decided the next step would be getting my git repositories onty my own hardware:) … But I will still mirror the public-relevant ones onto GitHub and Codeberg.

There is so much more

There are still around 10 services I actively maintain in my homelab, a VPS, in my University student group I maintain a full Cluster and much more to come here, so stick around! Its getting late so thats it for today!

Written by T1G3R.dev, 2026-06-05

Tags: docker , self hosting , proxmox , homelab