A basic homelab setup comes down to three things: hardware that can stay powered on 24/7 (an old PC, a mini PC, or a Raspberry Pi), a way to run more than one service on it without a mess (Docker covers most people), and a home network you understand well enough to keep it off the open internet. Most beginners have something running within an afternoon by starting with one machine and a single container, not by planning a rack from day one.
Also available in French: read this guide’s French translation-adaptation, Auto-hébergement : le guide complet pour monter votre premier homelab en 2026.
What this guide actually covers: a homelab is a computer, or a few, that you run yourself to learn, tinker, and host software you’d otherwise pay a subscription for. If you end up storing movies or music on it, that’s for your personal, legally acquired media library; this guide has nothing to do with torrents, IPTV, or debrid services, and won’t point you toward any of that.
What is a homelab, exactly?
A homelab is a computer or a small cluster of them, usually sitting at home, that you set up and manage yourself instead of renting space in someone else’s cloud. People build them for different reasons: to learn Linux, networking, or Kubernetes without risking a production system, to run self-hosted apps instead of paying for the SaaS version, to practice security skills somewhere breaking things doesn’t cost a client, or honestly, just because tinkering with servers is the hobby itself.
“Home server” and “homelab” get used almost interchangeably, but there’s a rough distinction. A home server usually means one machine quietly running a couple of always-on services, something like Jellyfin or a NAS. A homelab tends to describe something a bit more experimental: multiple machines, virtualization, a setup you’re actively rebuilding and occasionally breaking on purpose. Nobody enforces the line, so don’t lose sleep over which term technically fits what you’re building.
What do you actually need to get started?
Strip away the enthusiast talk about rack rails and 10-gigabit switches, and a working homelab comes down to four things.
- A machine that can stay powered on. It doesn’t need to be fast, just reliable and idle most of the time.
- A stable local network. Your existing router is enough to start; you don’t need VLANs or a managed switch on day one.
- An operating system or hypervisor. A mainstream Linux distribution works, or Proxmox VE if you’d rather split one machine into several virtual ones from the start.
- A way to run applications without installing each one by hand. Docker is what most of the self-hosted world has settled on for this, and it’s where the next few sections point you.
Choosing your hardware: Raspberry Pi vs mini PC vs old PC vs NAS
This is the decision beginners spend the most time agonizing over, and honestly, any of the four options below will get a first homelab running. What actually changes between them is cost, noise, power draw, and how much room you have to grow before you outgrow it. If you already own an old laptop or desktop doing nothing in a closet, start there. It costs nothing, and running Docker on a five-year-old machine teaches you just as much as running it on something new.
Before you buy anything: check whether you already own something that qualifies. An old laptop, a decommissioned office PC, even a spare phone in a pinch, all of it counts. Skipping this step and buying hardware you didn’t need is one of the few homelab mistakes that costs real money instead of just time.
| Raspberry Pi | Mini PC | Repurposed old PC | Off-the-shelf NAS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | Around $60-80 for a Raspberry Pi 5 board alone, per Raspberry Pi’s own pricing | Roughly $150-300 new for an Intel N100-class box, less used | Free if it’s already in the house | $200-600+ before drives, depending on bay count |
| Power draw | A few watts | Around 5-15W idle | Higher, varies a lot with age | Low to moderate, scales with drive count |
| Raw performance | Fine for lightweight, single-purpose services | Comfortable for most self-hosted apps at once | Depends entirely on how old it is | Built for storage throughput, not general compute |
| Storage room | Limited, USB or an add-on HAT | Usually one or two internal bays | Whatever the case physically fits | Built for it, several bays as standard |
| Best first use | Pi-hole, Home Assistant, small single-purpose services | A do-everything Docker host | Getting started for exactly $0 | Media libraries and backups once storage is the bottleneck |
On the Raspberry Pi specifically: a Raspberry Pi 5 handles Pi-hole, Home Assistant, and a handful of small containers at once without strain, based on Raspberry Pi’s own published specifications. Where it struggles is video transcoding and anything that needs more RAM than the board supports, which is where a mini PC’s x86 chip and easier memory upgrades start to matter.
How much does a homelab actually cost to set up?
Zero, if you’re repurposing hardware you already own and sticking to free, open-source software. That’s a genuinely common starting point. A lot of homelabs begin life as an old gaming PC that got relegated to a closet the moment a new one showed up. If you’re buying hardware specifically for this, a Raspberry Pi 5 starts at around $60 for the 4GB board direct from Raspberry Pi, before you add a case, power supply, and storage. Budget mini PCs built around efficient chips like Intel’s N100 typically land in the $150-300 range new, and noticeably less secondhand, where retired office machines show up constantly. A NAS with several drive bays is the biggest jump, often $300-600 before you’ve bought a single drive to put in it.
Software costs nothing extra on top. Docker, Proxmox VE, Home Assistant, Pi-hole, and most of what you’d actually install on a homelab are free and open source. The ongoing cost is electricity, and low-power hardware like a Raspberry Pi or an idle mini PC draws only a few watts, nowhere close to what an always-on gaming desktop would add to your bill.
Does a homelab need a router?
Your existing home router is enough to start. It already handles the two things a beginner homelab needs: handing out local IP addresses and letting devices on your network see each other. You don’t need a business-grade router, VLANs, or a managed switch on day one, whatever some more advanced guides might imply.
A router upgrade starts to matter once you’re running several servers and want to isolate untrusted traffic, a smart-home gadget you don’t fully trust, say, onto its own VLAN, or once you’ve simply run out of ports on the back of an ISP-issued box. Neither of those is a beginner problem. Get one service running reliably on the network you already have before spending money on a networking problem you don’t have yet.
Do you need a NAS for a homelab?
Not to get started, no. Plenty of homelabs run for months on storage that’s just a spare drive plugged into whatever machine is already running Docker. A NAS, whether that’s an off-the-shelf box or a repurposed PC running TrueNAS or Unraid, earns its keep once you have more data than comfortably fits on one drive, or once redundancy matters, meaning a single failed drive doesn’t take your files down with it.
That matters most for anything you can’t just re-download: your own photos, documents, backups, and yes, a personal media library. If you’re planning to run something like Jellyfin for your own, legally acquired movies and shows, storage capacity and redundancy become the real bottleneck long before CPU power does. A Raspberry Pi streams video just fine; it just can’t grow past whatever you can physically attach to it. TrueNAS Scale, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault are the three names you’ll see recommended constantly here, each striking a different balance between ease of use and flexibility.
Bare metal, Docker, or Proxmox: picking your software layer
You’ve got three broad options for how software actually runs on your hardware, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Installing apps directly onto a Linux distribution is the simplest to understand, but cleanup gets messy once you’ve installed a dozen things that way and can’t remember what touched what. Docker solves that by keeping each app in its own container, config included, so removing one is just deleting a folder. Proxmox VE goes a step further and turns one physical machine into a hypervisor that runs several virtual machines and lightweight containers side by side, which is popular specifically because it isolates experiments from each other.
Not sure which Linux distribution to pick? Debian or Ubuntu Server are the two safest defaults for a first homelab, mainly because most self-hosted app documentation assumes you’re running one of them.
Docker is the easiest on-ramp if you’re installing your first service today. On most Linux distributions, the official convenience script handles it in two lines:
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.shThat’s the convenience script straight from Docker’s own installation docs, and it works the same way across most distributions. Most homelabs that start with “just Docker” end up adding Proxmox later, once they want more than one operating system running on the same box.
What services should you actually run first?
Don’t try to replace your entire digital life in week one. A short, useful list beats an ambitious one you abandon halfway through.
- Pi-hole or AdGuard Home. Network-wide ad blocking that runs in one small container and gives you an immediate, visible result: DNS requests dropping across every device on your network, not just one browser.
- Portainer. A web dashboard for managing Docker containers without memorizing command-line flags, worth adding right after Docker itself.
- Uptime Kuma. A self-hosted status page that tells you when something you set up quietly stopped working, which happens more often than anyone expects once you’re running more than one service.
- A media server, if that’s what got you here in the first place. Our Jellyfin vs Plex comparison and Jellyfin server setup guide cover picking and installing one for your own, legally acquired media library.
- Home Assistant, once you’re ready to bring smart-home devices under your own roof instead of a manufacturer’s app and cloud account.
- A password manager or a small local AI stack, once the basics feel solid. Our Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden comparison and Best Self-Hosted AI Tools roundup cover both.
What you’ll have after a weekend: ad blocking working across your whole network, a dashboard to manage containers without touching the command line, and a status page that flags it the moment something quietly falls over.
Keeping your homelab safe once it’s running
Don’t forward ports you don’t understand. It’s tempting to open a port on your router the first time you want to reach something from outside the house. Every port you forward is also a door the rest of the internet can knock on, and automated scanners find open, unpatched services within hours, not months.
Two habits cover most of what a beginner actually needs. Reach your homelab from outside your home network through a mesh VPN like Tailscale or WireGuard instead of forwarding ports directly, so nothing is reachable unless you’re already authenticated onto your own private network. And back up anything you can’t recreate. A homelab holding the only copy of your family photos with no backup isn’t really a lab, it’s a single point of failure with better branding. The rule most people cite is 3-2-1: three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with at least one copy kept somewhere else entirely.
Mistakes beginners make more often than they’d like to admit
- Buying hardware before running a single service. Start with what you already own, and upgrade once you actually know what you’re bottlenecked on.
- Skipping backups because “it’s just a test server.” Test servers accumulate real, unreplaceable data faster than anyone plans for.
- Exposing a service directly to the internet to save five minutes of VPN setup.
- Never writing down what’s running where, or sketching even a rough network diagram. Future you, six months from now, won’t remember why a container is named test2.
FAQ
Is a Raspberry Pi enough for a homelab?
For lightweight, always-on services like Pi-hole, Home Assistant, or Uptime Kuma, yes; a Raspberry Pi 5 runs all three at once without strain. It stops being the right tool once you need video transcoding or a language model that needs more RAM than the board has.
How much power does a homelab actually use?
It depends entirely on the hardware. A single Raspberry Pi draws a few watts, similar to a phone charger. A mini PC idling with a handful of containers typically sits around 5-15 watts. Older repurposed desktops and multi-bay NAS units pull noticeably more, mostly because of spinning hard drives and less efficient older components, which is exactly why low-power boards and modern mini PCs have become the default recommendation for a first build.
Do I need to know Linux before I start?
It helps, but you don’t need to be fluent first. Most beginner guides, this one included, lean on Docker specifically because it hides a lot of Linux administration behind a single install command and a docker-compose.yml file. You’ll pick up the command line naturally while troubleshooting, which is a perfectly reasonable way to learn it.
What’s the difference between a homelab and a NAS?
A NAS is storage-focused hardware or software built around holding and protecting files. A homelab is the wider project, servers, networking, virtualization, self-hosted apps, that a NAS often ends up being one part of. Plenty of homelabs include a NAS; plenty of NAS owners never build anything they’d call a homelab.
Can I build a homelab without buying anything new?
Yes. An old laptop or desktop, a spare external drive, and the router you already own cover the first month or two of experimenting with Docker and a couple of self-hosted apps. Buy hardware once you know exactly what you’re missing, not before.
Is running a homelab legal?
Yes. A homelab is just computers you own, running mostly open-source software you control. Nothing about the concept touches legality one way or the other; what matters is what you put on it, same as any other computer. This guide sticks to self-hosted apps and your own, legally acquired files throughout.
Once the basics are running, the rest of the site digs into each piece in more depth. Our Raspberry Pi and Mini PC hubs cover hardware-specific setups, Proxmox and Docker & Containers go deeper on the software layer, and NAS & Storage rounds up TrueNAS, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault comparisons as we publish them, and our NAS vs. virtualization guide covers how to combine the two on one box. Our full Homelab hub collects everything else in this silo, and if a media server is what brought you here in the first place, Jellyfin vs Plex is the natural next stop.
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