Welcome to My Homelab – Built for Performance and availability, Run on Spare Change
This site is running on a high-performance, high-availability stack, built to handle serious traffic while keeping security and uptime in mind. And I only spent $11.*
VRT go brrr.
The Stack:
- Fedora Linux (an upstream of RedHat Linux)
- My edge server of choice. It’s handling all static content, offloading the heavy lifting, caching aggressively, and shaping traffic. I’ve customized it to serve as the first line of defense and performance.
- Apache, running upstream of Nginx, apache handles the dynamic content as well as PHP for interacting with our database
- Mysql, the database backend of choice for me. I could have used postgress or mariadb, they all end up about the same, once you know an SQL, you know most of them. The database is not hosted locally and is actually running from a different machine on my home network. It is a donor and writes to a separate replica elsewhere.
- Acting as my CDN, DNS, SSL terminator, and WAF. Honestly, it’s hard to beat Cloudflare’s free tier for what it offers—massive global distribution, security hardening, and DNS that resolves before you blink.
- WordPress, for hosting this site. It’s one of the most popular CMS in the world, so it’s a good way of showing what we can do.
There are a few other tools being used. Namely git/github for my tooling chain and deployment process. I’ve also done quite a few cool things with Nginx to make the server more responsive and secure. I’ll talk about those on some other pages. Gotta fill out the site content somehow.
I also have an entire homelab environment behind my firewall. In fact this site is served as a reverse-proxy from that firewall. A separate NAS device on my home network serves as:
The Homelab Backbone
- personal cloud storage
- personal dokuwiki
- self-hosted kanban board
- self-hosted immich (think google photos replacement)
- self-hosted music and video server
- self-hosted vpn with tailscale
- self-hosted audiobook server using audiobookshelf
- self-hosted ebook server with calibre (for koreader devices)
- self-hosted glance homepage for essential info.
- Monitoring for docker containers and on-network devices with glance and uptimekuma
Why Bother?
Curiosity and the desire to keep my skills sharp. It’s one thing to read about best practices in uptime, security, and performance—but it’s another to actually apply them, troubleshoot them at 2 AM, and see how everything holds up over time.
I’ve always believed the best way to really understand something is to roll up your sleeves and build it yourself. That’s what this site represents: a hands-on record of what works.
Along the way I’ll document some of the cool tricks I’ve learned so that hopefully they can help you.
Learn more about this site buy using one of the following links:
* The only money I’ve spent here was on the domain. I wasn’t even planning to do that, but when yourfullname.net is sitting there unclaimed, you don’t ask questions—you just buy it.