| It sounds like the concern here is that the OP is over-indexing on the use case for a home lab being a place to learn, and not a place to be productive. > But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects. > But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too. If you want to split hairs on naming, then the problem here is that you're imputing an overly strict definition onto the term 'homelab' to not include your use case, complaining that your use case is different to this definition, and then failing to see that the term is generally used loosely enough that it does your use case. Call it what you will, but from your description of things, you're using the server and associated tech as a homelab. I'd allow you to call it a "it's not a homelab, but" if you want permission to use a different term... ;P |