The Homelab Decision Guide

A homelab is a hobby, and the moment it stops being one, something has gone wrong.

This is not a click-by-click tutorial. Install commands rot, version numbers rot, screenshots rot fastest of all. This is a book about the decisions that don't: what to virtualize, how to segment a network so a smart plug can't reach your files, what deserves to be code and what deserves to be written down, and what's worth monitoring versus what's just noise with a dashboard.

What's inside:

• Hardware: what to buy, what to wait on, and what a used enterprise machine actually costs you
• Platform: Docker, Proxmox, or Kubernetes, and how to tell which one your lab needs
• Network segmentation that survives contact with real devices, not just a diagram
• Infrastructure as code: what to script, what to write down, and what to leave alone
• Choosing services you'll actually use, and dropping the ones you won't
• Backups that restore, not just run
• Monitoring you don't eventually learn to ignore

Victor Da Luz built and rebuilt his own homelab through failed migrations, a DNS leak that took months to notice, and services nobody ever used. Every chapter opens with one of those failures, pulls the reusable questions out of it, and ends with a decision tree and an exercise for your own lab.

Ten worksheets. Real decision trees. Nothing to buy before you've decided you need it.