Nivel 2
The household services
Your own Netflix, your own cloud, and a front door from the street.
Your film and music collection served to the TV and the phone. Access to your things from outside the house without opening a single port to the internet. And all of it with proper names, like films.myhouse, instead of numbers and ports.
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- What you put on it
- Proxmox VE, with Jellyfin, Immich, Nextcloud and a reverse proxy. Tailscale or Meshnet to get in from the street.
- Spending order
- Around $210 to $530 on top of level 1.
What you keep even if you sell the hardware
What you learn at this level
- Containers: why a service that breaks does not take the others with it.
- Reverse proxy and certificates: where the browser padlock comes from and why it expires.
- Private networks like Tailscale or Meshnet, and why they are infinitely safer than opening a port on the router.
- That once your family depends on a service, the experimenting is over: if it goes down on a Sunday, you fix it on the Sunday.
And now, what with
The parts
These come last on purpose: first what for, then what with. The price ranges are there to give your wallet a sense of scale, not to be believed — the real price is what you see when you open the link.
Mini PC with Core i5/i7 or Ryzen and 32 GB
Minisforum
For when the N100 is not enough. Look for two network ports and two NVMe slots: that is what separates a homelab mini PC from an office one.
Price range: MX$10,000 – MX$20,000
32 GB SO-DIMM RAM
Crucial
Almost every mini PC ships with half of what it takes. Adding memory is the cheapest upgrade there is and the one you notice most with virtual machines.
Price range: MX$1,500 – MX$3,000
8-port gigabit switch
TP-Link
Your ISP's router has four ports and two are already taken. A dumb switch like this costs little and removes the first bottleneck.
Price range: MX$500 – MX$900
2 TB NVMe
Samsung
For the virtual machines. Spinning drives cope with files, not with ten systems booting at once.
Price range: MX$2,500 – MX$4,000
When this gets too small for you
Nivel 3: What already looks like a rack