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. Later in the year did I remove the CAX41 from my infrastructure because of monetary reasons.
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 the link (non sponsored) at gelbphoenix.link/hetzner.
Besides my VPS instances at Hetzner have I also a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM and a Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF (Intel i5-7500, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 250GB NVMe SSD) which are in my home.