One month I added up what I was spending on subscriptions and realized I was paying a lot for services I barely used. Netflix, HBO, Disney, all of it, and most months I didn't even open half of them. On top of that, whenever I wanted to spin up a game server for friends, a basic VPS was expensive and still struggled for resources.

I had a computer sitting idle at home. I had bought it a while back to build a hackintosh, but I ended up moving my workflow to Linux and the machine was left collecting dust. I installed Proxmox on it and the homelab was born.

Proxmox runs multiple virtual machines and containers on a single piece of hardware, so each service stays isolated in its own place and I can turn whatever I want on or off without touching the rest.

Media

Instead of streaming, I use Jellyfin to serve movies and shows to any screen in the house. Behind it sits the arr stack, which takes care of the library without me having to hunt anything down by hand:

  • Prowlarr concentrates all the indexers in one place.
  • Radarr handles movies and Sonarr handles shows.
  • qBittorrent does the downloading.
  • Seerr is where I, and anyone I grant access, request a new title. The rest of the flow runs by itself from there.

For transcoding I threw a Radeon RX 5600 into the machine. With hardware transcoding, Jellyfin converts video on the fly to multiple devices at once without choking.

Game servers

The gaming side runs on the Pelican panel. Each server lives in its own container, so I spin up whatever game the crew wants on the spot and shut it down afterwards.

Access and results

To reach everything from outside the house I use Tailscale. My friends join my network to play as if they were on the same LAN, and I can access the services from anywhere, with DNS resolved by Tailscale itself instead of memorizing IPs.

In the end, the hardware was already mine and the machine draws so little power it barely shows on the electric bill. I traded a pile of monthly subscriptions and an expensive VPS for a cost that, day to day, is close to zero. And the library is mine: it doesn't vanish when a service decides to pull a title from its catalog.