Some thoughts to help you work out if you want a home server.

What’s a Home Server?

If you thought servers were big black boxes with blinky lights in noisy rooms then you’d be mostly correct, but a growing number of us are running them at home and they’re smaller and quieter than you think.

If you just want to block adverts with Pi-hole then you don’t need that much power and you can get away with a teeny tiny Raspberry Pi Zero that fits in your hand and costs £15.

A home server is any machine that lets you host things in your home.

Self-hosting

There’s a bunch of things you can self-host.

Services

Some services are only available by self-hosting them.

Blocking adverts in the browser alone means you still had to download the advert, even if you didn’t see it. Pi-hole blocks adverts by stopping your network from fetching the advert in the first place, which makes your browsing experience faster.

Jellyfin lets you host your own Netflix, and apps like calibre-web and audiobookshelf do the same for your books and podcasts.

Having a home server lets you make the most of your own media.

Applications

There are open source versions of loads of apps you’re already using, like Word processors and spreadsheets and stuff, as well as new ones you didn’t realise you’d need.

Mealie is one of my recent favourites, it’s a recipe management app that lets me do meal planning and then generate a shopping list with all the ingredients I need.

I use FreshRSS to keep up to date with RSS feeds as well as keep my phone and laptop clients in sync with each other.

Wireguard lets me access my home server from anywhere.

You can find more at Awesome Homelab and on Reddit.

Storage

If you’ve read my Why would you want a NAS? post you’ll know whether you need something for storage.

What I didn’t mention is that the line between a home server and “a NAS” can be a little blurry.

“NAS” just means network storage and “a NAS” usually refers to the machine you dedicate to doing NAS things. You don’t have to own “a NAS” to have NAS.

NAS + self host

Most NAS software has the ability to run custom apps somehow, so if you mainly wanted storage and only wanted to run a few apps you could get away with using your NAS device as a home server.

You can run your own apps even on the consumer NAS devices like the ones from Synology.

Home server + Network Attached Storage

If you wanted the opposite, mainly to self-host with a little bit of network storage, you could get away with plugging in some drives to your home server and making them available over the network.

This could be as small as a Raspberry Pi 5 with an NVME plugged in to it.

Home server with NAS virtualised

Some people set up their home server for virtualisation and use a virtual machine to run their NAS software and then use other virtual machines for self-hosting, which means the same device is now both “a NAS” and “a home server”.

Home server and a NAS

I personally have different machines for my NAS and my home server, and I think I’m right, but then my NAS is sat idle 99% of the time, so maybe I’m not.