Your first month of homelab building

Most new homelabbers buy more hardware than they need before they've figured out what to do with it. Here's the smarter path: one box, three projects, and a clear sense of what you're after before anything else gets ordered.

By Colin B. · Published June 10, 2026

The homelab rabbit hole is real. You come for a Plex server, and two months later you’re reading documentation for Kubernetes on a three-node cluster you built from spare parts. That progression is fine, even great. But the people who get there fastest start with a clear first project, not a full shopping cart.

This is what your first month actually looks like: one mini PC, Proxmox, and three projects that teach you most of what homelabbing is about.

Week one: Get one machine running

Buy a mini PC with an N100 processor. Flash Proxmox VE onto a USB drive using Rufus or Etcher, install it, and spend an afternoon in the web interface.

Proxmox is a hypervisor. It runs on your hardware and lets you create virtual machines (full operating systems, isolated from each other) and LXC containers (lighter-weight isolated environments that share the host’s Linux kernel). The web UI is at https://your-server-ip:8006 once Proxmox is installed.

Your first task: access your homelab from your laptop via SSH. Plug in a keyboard and monitor for the initial install, then never use them again. That shift — from treating a computer like a desktop to treating it like a server you manage remotely — is the first real homelab mindset change.

The Proxmox community scripts (tteck.github.io/Proxmox) install dozens of common apps as LXC containers with a single command. Run the Pi-hole script. Pi-hole is a network-level DNS-based ad blocker that filters ads before they reach any device on your network. It’s the standard first homelab project because it’s genuinely useful immediately, the install is five commands, and the web dashboard is satisfying proof that your setup works.

Week two: Set up real storage

Once Pi-hole is running and you trust SSH, add a NAS to your setup. A Synology 2-bay with two WD Red drives takes about 45 minutes to configure, including setting up RAID-1 (which mirrors your data across both drives so a single drive failure loses nothing).

Three things to configure immediately on the NAS:

Hyper Backup. Synology’s backup app. Point it at an external USB drive or a remote destination. The homelab rule everyone learns the hard way: RAID is not a backup. It protects against drive failure, not accidental deletion, not ransomware, not fire. Back up your important data to at least two locations from day one.

SMB file shares. Create a shared folder and connect it from your laptop as a network drive. This is how you’ll move files around your homelab. Once it’s mounted, it behaves like any other folder on your computer.

Synology Photos or Plex. Pick one thing the NAS should actually do for you. Synology Photos imports your phone photos over the network. Plex turns your media into a Netflix-style interface accessible from any device. Either one cements the NAS as something useful, not just a box sitting in a closet.

Week three: Learn networking

Buy a managed switch if you haven’t already (TP-Link TL-SG108E, ~$35). This is where the education starts.

VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks) let you divide one physical switch into multiple isolated networks. The typical homelab setup has a VLAN for trusted devices (your laptops and phones), a VLAN for lab traffic (your servers, VMs, experiments), and optionally an IoT VLAN for smart home devices. Traffic between VLANs only passes through your router, which gives you control over what can talk to what.

You don’t need to implement all of this in week three. The goal is to configure a single VLAN on your managed switch and route it through Proxmox. When you can ping devices on one VLAN from another only when you want them to be able to, you understand VLANs well enough to build on that.

pfSense and OPNsense are both free, open-source firewall and router operating systems you can run as a Proxmox VM. Either one replaces your home router’s firewall and gives you granular control over traffic between VLANs, DNS filtering, and intrusion detection. Running one in a VM (not on real hardware) as a learning exercise first is the low-risk way to explore routing without affecting your actual home network.

The scope-creep problem

Most homelabs die in a closet not because the hardware fails but because the builder ran out of clear projects. They bought more gear than they had uses for, set up services they never actually used, and slowly stopped caring.

The antidote is usefulness. Every service running in your homelab should do something for you: save you money, teach you something you can use at work, host data you actually access, or solve a real problem. A homelab running Pi-hole, a personal Nextcloud, and automated media backups is more valuable than one with fifteen containers that nobody uses.

What to add in month two: Once you have a mini PC with Proxmox, a NAS with backup, and a managed switch with at least one VLAN configured, you have a real homelab. From there:

• Nextcloud for self-hosted file storage and calendar sync
• Home Assistant for smart home automation (works best on a Raspberry Pi or its own mini PC)
• Uptime Kuma for monitoring your services with a clean dashboard
• Grafana + Prometheus for visualizing system metrics once you care about them

Each of these has extensive setup documentation and an active community. You won’t be starting from scratch for any of them.

What you actually learn

The skills a homelab builds are real and transferable. Proxmox teaches you virtualization concepts that map directly to AWS EC2, Azure VMs, and every cloud provider’s infrastructure. Network configuration with pfSense teaches you firewall rules, NAT, and routing that look almost identical to enterprise network setups. Managing Docker containers on your own hardware is exactly what DevOps engineers do at scale.

This is the other reason homelabs are worth taking seriously: the hardware pays off as a learning environment in ways a cloud sandbox doesn’t, because you’re responsible for everything and can break things without consequences. An afternoon of debugging why two containers can’t talk to each other teaches you more about networking than a week of reading.

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Ready to buy your first hardware? See our homelab building gear guide for the mini PCs, managed switches, and NAS enclosures worth buying first.