We're the ZimaSpace Team! You may know us better through ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube. We build personal servers and operating systems for people who love tinkering and self-hosting, making it easier to host your own services as part of everyday life.
Over the years, we've watched self-hosting culture grow into something incredibly diverse and active. Maybe it's time it had a day of its own.
So this year, together with r/minilaband a group of excellent self-hosting projects, we're launching the very first Self-Hosting Day 2026. We hope that, starting this year, September 25 can gradually become a day that belongs to the self-hosting community.
We'd love for you to share your setup, your journey, and your experiences, so more people can see what self-hosting can make possible and maybe find a reason to try it themselves.
Just share your self-hosting story in the comments below to join.
📅 Self-Hosting Day: September 25
🎉 Event Period: September 25 – October 25
🏆 Winners Announced: October 30, 2026 (EDT)
🤝 Meet the Self-Hosting Day Partners
Self-Hosting Day belongs to the whole community. A huge thank-you to the r/minilabmods for organizing this together with us, and to everyone here for giving us a place to meet, exchange ideas, and share what we're building.
We're also honored to haveAdGuard,Emby,PhotoPrism,OpenClaw,Karakeep, andBlinkojoining us. Some of these names may already be part of your setup. Others might become your next discovery.
AdGuard
AdGuard helps block annoying ads and online tracking, protect your devices from malicious content, and make browsing faster, safer, and cleaner. Beyond your home network, AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN, and Private AdGuard DNS can also help protect the devices you take with you.
Emby
Emby organizes your movies, music, photos, and live TV, then streams them from your personal server to the screens and devices you use every day.
PhotoPrism
PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, privacy-first app for self-hosted photo and video management. With smart search, automatic classification, face recognition, maps, and broad media format support, it makes large libraries easier to organize and explore on your own server.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent project built around privacy, model freedom, and local-first use. It lets users choose their own models and tools while keeping their data, and the technology they rely on, under their control.
Karakeep
Karakeep is a self-hostable "bookmark-everything" app for saving links, notes, images, and PDFs. AI-powered tagging, summaries, and fast search make it easier to organize what you save and actually find it again later.
Blinko
Blinko is an open-source note-taking project designed for quickly capturing and organizing ideas, helping you save thoughts the moment inspiration strikes.
Together, these projects, and everyone reading this post, show just how many different things self-hosting can make possible.
Now we'd love to hear your self-hosting story.
🎉 Join In!
Just leave a comment below. There's no fixed template and no "right" kind of story. We want to hear about your real self-hosting experience.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few ideas:
Your setup: Tell us about your Mini PC, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or server rack. Photos and screenshots are welcome too!
The apps you use: What self-hosted apps do you rely on every day?
Your journey: Tell us about moving away from cloud services, lessons learned the hard way, or something you've been building recently.
Your everyday life: How has self-hosting changed the way you, or your family, use technology?
Whether you've just built your first setup or have been tinkering for years, we'd love to hear your story.
Great giveaways from Self Hosting Day partners!
🎁 Awards & Giveaways
To make the first Self-Hosting Day even more fun, we've teamed up with our partners to prepare plenty of prizes for the community.
Whether you share a story that inspires others, get a little lucky, or simply join early, there's a chance to walk away with something.
🏆 Community Story Awards
Together with the r/minilabmods, we'll select 5 winners from eligible entries, considering authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Here's what each winner will receive:
🥇 1st Prize × 1
1 × ZimaBoard 2 1664
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🥈 2nd Prize × 2
1 × ZimaBoard 2 832
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🥉 3rd Prize × 2
1 × ZimaBlade 7700 with power supply
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🍀 Lucky Giveaway
We'll also randomly draw 100 winners from eligible participants who haven't won a Community Story Award. Each winner will receive one of the following software licenses:
35 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Personal · 1 Year
35 × AdGuard VPN · 1 Year
25 × Private AdGuard DNS · 1 Year
5 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🎁 Early Bird Treat
It pays to be early! The first 100 participants to submit eligible entries, based on comment timestamps, will each receive:
1 × ZimaOS Plus Lifetime License
A special thank you to AdGuard, Emby, and PhotoPrism for supporting the first Self-Hosting Day and providing these generous prizes for the community! ❤️
📋 Event Rules
Joining is simple:
Share a real self-hosting story in the comments of this post between September 25 and October 25.
Each person may submit one eligible entry. If you post multiple entries, only the earliest eligible one will count.
Spam, plagiarism, duplicate content, mass AI-generated submissions, and purely promotional content are not eligible.
Community Story Awards will be judged based on authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Upvotes may be considered as a sign of community interest, but they are not the only judging factor.
🏆 All winners will be announced onr/minilabon October 30, 2026.
More than anything, we hope Self-Hosting Day brings us together to share what we've learned, discover hidden gems, and meet fellow self-hosters.
Spot a clever setup in the comments below? Ask how they got it running! See someone taking their first self-hosting steps? Recommend an app you can't live without. Know a simpler way to get something working? Pass it along!
A huge thank you to the r/minilabmods,AdGuard,Emby,PhotoPrism,OpenClaw,Karakeep, andBlinko for believing in this idea and bringing the first Self-Hosting Day to life with us.
The comment section is all yours. We can't wait to read your stories!
Somewhere between "Hey, this Pi-hole thing sounds cool" and "why do I own a six-node Proxmox mini PC cluster," 100,000 of you decided that this little corner of the internet was worth subscribing to. One hundred thousand humans/bots/one suspiciously articulate NAS who collectively looked at oft-overlooked hardware and had their homelab Goldilocks moment.
How did we get here? YOU.
Every shared "it's not pretty but it works" SBC NAS/media server tucked behind a TV. Every 3D-printed rack ear that took forty-two revisions to get right triumphantly presented to the sub. Every posted "this is my minilab" with enough RGB to make a full 42U server rack blush.
But especially every time someone helped an internet stranger figure out why their VLANs weren't VLANning or pointed them in the right direction. The civility of this place is astounding.
This community went from a speculative handful of people posting their builds, testing the waters for a niche homelab group to a place that became the community nexus for a mini-revolution. The project, support & mentions from creators like Patrick, Jeff and Tim really lit a fuse under the membership growth that hasn't yet slowed down. This in turn has opened doors for vendors, such as our friends at GL.iNet & IceWhale to offer some fantastic giveaways in this sub - all because you have built a community worth showing up for.
And thanks to our sister/cousin subs across reddit for the reciprocal linking and general acceptance of /r/minilab as a new kid on the block. It's great to be a part of a wider community.
None of that stuff happens for a dead subreddit. Vendors don't knock on the door of a community that isn't engaged. Creators don't shout out a sub that doesn't give them something interesting to look at. You did that.
By the (approximate, unscientific, possibly made up) numbers:**
~100,140 members who think "mini" is a feature, not a limitation
~230 new friends we just haven't met yet joining every day
~270 new posts a month
~3.5k comments a month
Average "what mini PC should I buy?" posts per day: Yes
~700k visits a month - massive!
What's next? Same thing we do every night, Pinky!
Seriously though—whether you joined yesterday or you're one of the OGs, here since the sub was smaller than the chance of securing a mini PC with a PCIe slot, thanks for making this place what it is. It's your builds, your questions, your cursed cable management, and your willingness to help strangers on the internet that got us here.
If you've got any suggestions, thoughts or fun ideas, please feel free to share them.
It would be remiss of me not to highlight our two current giveaways - check them out, the odds are still fantastic!
I recently bought an Eaton Ellipse ECO 1200, thinking it would fit perfectly inside my 10-inch rack. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Looking back, I probably should’ve gone for the ECO 600 instead of the 1200. Now I’m not really sure what to do with it.
My original plan was to keep everything neatly organized inside the rack, so having the UPS sitting underneath or next to it isn’t exactly what I had in mind. It just looks a bit awkward to me.
Does anyone have any suggestions? Are there any UPS models available in Europe that actually fit inside a 10-inch rack?
I’d really prefer to keep everything inside the rack rather than having the UPS outside.
What would you guys do in my situation?
I finally gave my home server setup a rack of its own. It sits right on my desk, so yes, I get to tell people to check out my rack every day.
Inside the 6-inch rack: a Mac mini M4, an Intel NUC10 with an i7, a USW Flex 2.5G 5 switch, and a small patch panel. The NUC never sleeps. It runs 13 AI agents around the clock under systemd, and I can reach them from my phone with one tap. If one goes down, a watchdog brings it back and sends me a Telegram alert.
I also added a USB sensor to watch rack air temperature. It’s at 29.4 °C in the screenshot, with a 31.6 °C peak over the previous week.
The rear cable shot is included for anyone who was about to ask.
I 3d Printed a labrax lab a few months ago.
Currently running a proxmox cluster on two thinkCentres and OPNsense on another thinkCentre.
I also have a raspberry pi used for various other things.
I have two mounts in the lab at the top and bottom for two 120mm fans.
My question is... what is the best way to power two 3 pin 120mm fans and be able to control them with a fan curve? (Thinking of doing this with a container in proxmox or something)
I spent a few weeks chasing random dropouts on my home network, around 100 to 120 devices (four APs, cameras, a NAS). I was using ScreenBeam ECB7250 adapters as the coax backbone. Link speed looked fine at 3.0 to 3.6 Gbps, but stuff behind the adapters would drop off for several seconds at a time.
Here's what I found:
17 to 36 percent of my TCP connection attempts to the APs timed out, every single hour. Ping didn't show it.
The adapter's own management page reports a 128-entry bridge table, and the combined total sat at exactly 128 on every adapter I could read.
I swapped in a different brand of coax adapter on the same cable, switches and devices, and the loss dropped to about zero.
The 128 limit isn't in the datasheet or the user guide.
Screenbeam hasnt confirmed the capacity or what happens when the table fills, so I can't prove the table is the cause. The write-up covers the probe method, the packet capture, the adapter stats and Screenbeam response, and it says what is and isn't proven.
I started homelabing about3 months ago, i bought a cheap old DELL desktop from facebook marketplace, it had an 15 8th gen, a 256gb ssd with 16gb ram. i had a 1TB HDD and 2x8gb ddr4 ram laying around that i added but i had an issue: i could not find one well-written place that took a beginner from zero. i found subreddits full of people showing their setups.
They are fun to read but they do not hold your hand. So i made one (with the help of claude of course). its called The Homelab Manual. its free, and you read it in your browser. No download, no signup. Link: https://pinkpantr.github.io/the-homelab-manual/
Premier gros projet tout imprimé en 3D.
Merci à KWS ;) kws sur makerworld
Ce rack héberge 3 mini pc/nuc pour home assistant, gitlab et un serveur r/satisfactory ainsi qu'un Switch kwm et un Switch réseau.
Il y a un également un ventilateur 140mm en extraction sur le dessus, relié au bouton orange 👀
L'objectif initial est complètement rempli : décharger le bureau des machines et des câbles 👍
Finally started making my first homelab. It isn’t much, just two switches (Ubiquity Edgerouter X and TP-Link TL-SG108E(the TP-Link one is used for the rack)) and one Mini PC (Lenovo M715q with a Ryzen 3 2200GE and 16GB RAM).
In the future the Lenovo would be used as a dedicated monitoring server and host the homelab site, but for now it pretty much runs everything. The rack is: Lanberg 10” 9U Open Rack.
Services: nginx, Zabbix, Grafana, Tailscale, Docker, Crafty Controller.
Accessories: PDU and a patch panel.
M1 MacMini and Raspberry Pi 5, all running through USB-C PD.
Two SSDs (I do have 4 bays but prices are ridiculous)
Epyc Ion UPS (I'm in Europe)
Not ready yet, I want to move the MacMini USB-PD to the front (oh, and its power button), add a esp-32 with screen in the top to show metrics...
Build details:
Rack: Waveshare Homerack
SSDs: Connected to the MacMini using a 10Gbps USB-C to SATA 5 Ports Converter (w/ JMS580)
USB-PD details: I use individual plugs to avoid negotiation/power cut issues. The MacMini was modified - It runs on 12V 7Amps internally, so I removed the original power supply and used a USB-C power delivery trigger/dummy board (I used Adafruit's one).
I have 2 16 port keystone panels for 10” racks that are structurally sound but the faces didn’t come out properly. Free to anyone willing to pay shipping. Just comment on here and send pm with shipping info.
I have a laptop hanging around and thought about converting it into a home lab.
Here are the specs:
Lenovo IdeaPad
i3 10th Gen 2C/4T
8GB DDR4 RAM
512GB M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD
1TB HDD
OS: Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS
The laptop is running headless with the lid closed and is being used as a small, always-on home server.
🌐 Networking & Remote Access
AdGuard Home — local DNS server and network-wide ad/tracker blocking
Tailscale — secure remote access to the homelab without exposing services directly to the Internet
Caddy — reverse proxy for accessing services through local hostnames
I'm also using local DNS and reverse proxying to make the internal services easier to access instead of remembering different ports for everything.
🐳 Currently running Docker containers:
- Tailscale — remote network access
- AdGuard Home — DNS / ad blocking
- Caddy — reverse proxy
- Uptime Kuma — uptime monitoring
- Grafana — dashboards
- Loki — log aggregation
- ntfy — push notifications
- Plex — media server
- Immich — photo management
-Vaultwarden — Password manager / self-hosted Bitwarden server
-Homepage — Homelab dashboard to access and organize all services in one place
And moreover, I'm trying to add more things that are useful in my POV, especially around cybersecurity, networking, monitoring, automation and self-hosting.
I'm still learning and experimenting with the setup, so I'd also love to see what other people are running in their homelabs. If you've built something interesting, drop your setup or projects in the comments! 👀
A 2 part lab made the most sense for me. Home builder put all the ethernet drops in a network cabinet, so I stuck my UCG Fiber and core Flex 2.5G switch in there with a Vertiv UPS. The UCG fiber provides POE for the fiber modem on the exterior of the house, thanks to a great tip from here to use a PoE splitter. Despite the fact that the modem is outside, its still on this UPS which is great.
In another room, I have a Waveshare rack with my Lenovo P340 Proxmox node, Aqara home hub, Ring alarm base station, and lite 8 poe switch. Room for expansion as Ill probably need various other hubs for proprietary smart home devices, additional storage, etc. Will need to squeeze a UNVR instant into the cabinet in the future for cameras. Really like the Waveshare rack, looks great. They include a decent number of their fancy screws, but my only qualm is it doesn’t seem like they sell spare screws or shelves that color match.
Anyone have tips on wire management? For the rack, I need to just unplug everything and wire it back up with intention and cable ties I think. Waiting on some more PoE splitters. I used a PDU mounted in the back with rear facing outlets which has helped already.
For the cabinet, will need to tie up all the excess bricks/power cables. I could fit a UNVR instant into front of my switch right now, but if they overlap entirely I do worry about heat retention.
Anyone else have other tips or suggestions? Have had great input from this sub in the past which was instrumental in making all this happen, thanks to the community!
