Homelab online • self-hosting & always learning
I’m Joshua Sippley - a homelabber by obsession. What began as a way to escape monthly subscriptions turned into a genuine love for Linux, networking, virtualization, and running my own infrastructure.
About
It started simply enough: I was tired of paying every month for services I knew I could host myself. Cancelling those subscriptions saved a little money, but it accidentally uncovered something better - I genuinely love this stuff.
These days the homelab is my playground for learning: Proxmox clusters, Docker stacks, UniFi networking, reverse proxies, off-site backups, and an ever-growing shelf of self-hosted apps. It’s never “finished” - and that’s exactly the point.
If there’s a good open-source alternative I can run myself, it gets a home on my hardware.
A service isn’t done until it’s monitored and backed up 3-2-1. Data loss is forever.
Every new container is an excuse to learn something - networking, security, or just why it broke at 2am.
Privacy and open source matter to me. I’d rather own my data than rent it back from someone else.
The stack
The platforms and tools my homelab is built on - and the ones I’m still learning.
The homelab runs on Proxmox VE - production and lab side by side, high availability where it counts, and Proxmox Backup Server keeping it all safe.
A long-time Linux user - Arch on the desktop, Debian and Ubuntu on the servers. Almost everything runs in Docker, orchestrated with Compose so a rebuild is one command away.
A full UniFi stack handles routing, switching, and firewalling across VLANs on dual-stack IPv4/IPv6. Services reach the world through Nginx Proxy Manager and Pangolin - exposed carefully, never carelessly.
A Hetzner VPS extends the lab into the cloud for a true hybrid setup. Uptime Kuma and Beszel watch everything, with ntfy and Gotify pinging me the moment something needs attention - all open-source, all mine.
View live statusThe software and platforms I use every day to run services, automate workflows, monitor infrastructure, and keep everything online.
Self-hosted
A living snapshot of the homelab. It grows every time I find something new worth hosting.
Oak & Sprout - tracking feeds, naps, and nappies for the newest member of the household.
FamilySelf-hosted streaming for the whole media library - movies, shows, and music, no monthly fee.
MediaSonarr, Radarr and friends automating media management from search to shelf.
MediaCookieless, privacy-friendly analytics for my sites - insights without the surveillance.
MonitoringUptime monitoring and clean status pages keeping an eye on every service.
MonitoringLightweight monitoring for servers and containers - resource health at a glance.
MonitoringThe brain of the smart home - local-first automation and control, no cloud required.
AutomationSimple self-hosted push notifications straight to my phone from scripts and services.
AutomationA tidy internal hub collecting alerts and messages from across the homelab.
AutomationDisposable, containerised browsers and desktops - a fresh environment in a tab.
ProductivityA complete PDF toolbox - merge, split, convert - that never touches someone else’s cloud.
ProductivityPrivacy-first image processing kept entirely on my own hardware.
ProductivityMy own corner of the fediverse - decentralised, ad-free social on my terms.
SocialFederated, end-to-end encrypted chat through Element - messaging I fully control.
SocialExperimenting with PewDiePie’s self-hosted AI workspace - learning by tinkering.
FunMinecraft and other multiplayer worlds, hosted for friends and family to jump into.
FunReliability
Hosting is the fun part. Keeping the data safe is the part that actually matters - so resilience is built in, not bolted on.
The live data plus two independent backups, so a single failure is never the whole story.
Backups live on different systems - Proxmox Backup Server at home, plus a separate backup node.
At least one copy always lives off-site - a remote node and cloud storage endpoints, ready for the worst day.
Backups are verified and Proxmox Backup Server reports in automatically - because an untested backup is just a hope.
