Pi-hole, Proxmox, and the Self-Hosted Resurgence

Archive note: this is a backdated post, written years later while rebuilding this site. It’s dated to the moment it covers, but the hindsight is real.

Something has shifted in the self-hosting world. The communities are growing fast, the tooling has gone from “wiki and prayers” to genuinely polished, and the people arriving aren’t the usual sysadmin refugees — they’re ordinary technical folk who watched a decade of platform behavior and reached the obvious conclusion. A state-of-the-homelab address, then, from someone who’s been preaching this since Log4Shell was the wake-up call.

Why now — the push

Reread this blog’s last four years and the recruitment campaign writes itself: platforms change owners and rules overnight. Clouds fail globally from single updates. Streaming services fragment, hike prices, and pull catalogs. Subscription line items multiply until the monthly total reads like rent. And the new AI features arrive with a default assumption that your data is their training set. Every one of those is a push toward the same answer: own the layer you depend on.

Why now — the pull

The push existed for years; what changed is the pull. Self-hosting stopped being hard in three specific ways:

1. Docker Compose became the universal packaging. Any service worth running is a ten-line YAML block away. The “how do I install” era — dependencies, init scripts, distro quirks — simply ended; the skill transferred from sysadmin folklore to copy-paste-and-understand.
2. Proxmox made the hypervisor boring. The free, web-managed VM/LXC layer means one mini-PC or aging desktop becomes a fleet: one container for Pi-hole (network-wide ad and tracker blocking — still the gateway drug, still the demo that converts visitors), one for Jellyfin (the no-subscription media server), one VM for experiments that can explode safely. Snapshots before risky changes; rollback when curiosity wins. It’s the lab in homelab.
3. The hardware found its price. Used corporate mini-PCs flooded the market, ARM boards matured, and — as predicted when Ethereum freed the GPUs — even acceleration is affordable now. Local LLMs joined the stack last year and run happily beside the media server.

The honest sermon

Because recruitment posts that skip the costs are marketing: self-hosting trades subscription fees for responsibility. You are now the backup strategy (3-2-1 or it didn’t happen), the security team (no exposed ports, VPN in, update discipline — staggered, after the news settles), and the on-call rotation (population: you). The household SLA is real, and “the internet is down” complaints route to your chair. Budget the hours honestly.

But the exchange rate is the best in tech: those hours purchase skills that compound — networking, containers, storage, DNS, reverse proxies, the entire production stack in miniature, learned on systems where mistakes cost pride instead of careers. Half of what I know about infrastructure, I learned breaking my own services at midnight. The other half, fixing them at 1am.

The movement’s quiet milestone this year: “what do you self-host?” has become a normal question among developers — the way “do you have a blog?” once was. The platforms taught everyone the lesson; the tooling finally made the answer practical. The rack in the corner stopped being eccentric. It became the most honest relationship with software most of us have.