| You're spending that much time on it because you're doing too much. Your use of the term "homelab" is telling. I have: * A rented VPS that's been running for ~15 years without any major issues, only a couple hours a month of maintenance. * A small NUC-like device connected to the TV for media. Requires near-zero maintenance. * A self-built 5-drive NAS based around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a carrier board built for NAS/networking uses. Requires near-zero maintenance. * A Raspberry Pi running some home automation stuff. This one requires a little more effort because the hardware it talks to is flaky, as is some of the software, so maybe 2-3 hours a month. The basics (internet access itself) are just a commodity cable modem, a commodity router running a manufacturer-maintained OpenWRT derivative, a pair of consumer-grade APs reflashed with OpenWRT, and a few consumer-grade switches. There's no reason for me to roll my own here, and I don't want to be on the hook for it when it breaks. And if any of the stuff in the bulleted list breaks, it can sit for days or weeks if I don't feel like touching it, because it's not essential. And yes, I've hard hardware failures and botched software upgrades. They take time to resolve. But it's not a big burden, and I don't spent much time on this stuff. > I have a much more complex setup than necessary Yup. > Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work. You don't need this. Trying to get even remotely there will eat up your time, and that time is better spent doing something else. Unless you enjoy doing that, which is fine, but say that, and don't try to claim that self-hosting necessarily takes up a lot of time. |
I started small, with just a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant, then Proxmox on an old laptop... growing to what I have now. Each iteration has added complexity, but it's also added capability and resiliency.