My homelab as a hands-on lab for digital sovereignty
Not a perfect miniature data center, but an ongoing experiment: which services do I want to run myself, and what does that control cost in maintenance, time and complexity?
My homelab is not a project with a final “done” state. It is my practical lab for self-hosting, networking, backups and the broader question of which parts of my digital infrastructure I want to control myself.
What runs in it
It includes, or has included, Proxmox hosts, a QNAP NAS, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, Nextcloud and Immich. Some services stay, others get replaced. Those migrations are part of the project: a self-hosted solution is not automatically better just because it runs in my home.
A concrete example
My photo infrastructure is a good example. Instead of forcing an existing setup to do everything, I gradually migrated photos to Immich and reassessed storage, performance and backup paths along the way. I take a similar approach to remote access: services should not be exposed publicly when LAN and WireGuard can provide the access I actually need.
The homelab is therefore mainly a way to make technical trade-offs tangible. Availability, updates, power consumption, recovery and maintenance are just as much a part of digital sovereignty as the location of the data itself.
Principles
- self-host when control creates real value
- do not expose services publicly when LAN/VPN is sufficient
- treat backups and recovery as part of the system
- replace services when another solution fits better
- do not confuse complexity with independence