Why I Still Self-Host
A Tour of My Homelab at the Beginning of 2026
hen I started to self-host in 2025 it was more about learning advanced server administration and leaving the big cloud storage providers. Over the time in 2025 my starting VPS expanded to a small private infrastructure with multiple different self-hosted services which allowed me to leave more and more big tech and proprietary services which allowed me to save money which i would have had to spend on subscriptions on these services.
Under the Hood
The Hardware part of my Homelab
Currently I have three Virtual Private Servers by Hetzner – which is my trusted VPS and storage provider since I started to self-host. One is a CX53 which is x86_64 based, the other two are ARM based the CAX41 and CAX11 and all are hosted in Hetzner's EU data centers in Nürnberg, Germany and Helsinki, Finland.
For storage I have also two BX11 storage boxes (one as a Backup place and one for storage) with Hetzner which each have 1TB capacity and are upgradeable.
If you yourself want to start with Hetzner – which I can strongly recommend – you can use my referral link (non sponsored) at gelbphoenix.link/hetzner to get a 20€ promo code which you can use for any cloud product from Hetzner.