As a kid, I was always messing with technology — taking it apart and putting it back together again. I got a Raspberry Pi 2 B, which got me into operating systems and coding, but I wanted to take it a step further.
In July 2022, when I was 13 years old, I bought an HP DL380 G7, which was the start of my homelab journey. It had:
- Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz
- 16 GB RAM
- 146 GB of disk
I originally had no idea what to do with it, so I loaded Proxmox onto it and started a business called Sky Hosting — a typical Pterodactyl 'summer host.' It was somewhat successful, and along the way I taught myself Linux commands, Amazon S3 buckets for backups, and basic debugging."
As I got older, around May 2025, I started building virtual machines for mini projects so I could learn more — n8n, Kali Linux, Plex, Windows 10, Portainer. Eventually I started hosting small game servers and Discord bot servers through my company, Wave Host.
I was gifted a Raspberry Pi 4 and loaded Home Assistant onto it so I could access all my smart home devices in one app. But there was one thing missing... backups.
If there's one thing I've learned along this journey, it's this: always have a backup before you change something. There have been so many times I've changed something, lost data, and had no backup — meaning I had to redo everything from scratch.
So instead of paying $3.00 a month for a Hetzner storage box, I built a NAS out of my Raspberry Pi 2 B. Alongside that, I bought a Cisco WS-C2960S-48LPS-L Catalyst switch with 48 ports.
This is my 2026 setup. I upgraded the server to 78 GB of RAM and 918 GB of disk. The NAS now has 3.66 TB of storage — one of the drives came from an Apple AirPort Time Capsule I took apart, and it's still healthy.
Over the past four years, my homelab has changed a lot. I'm currently satisfied with my setup and looking to buy a rack to organize everything. This setup should last a while, but changes will definitely happen.
Thats all for now, thanks for reading if you made it to the end!