Also known as: Home server, Self-hosting
A home server is a computer you run at home to host services for yourself — file storage (a NAS), a personal site, or media you stream around the house.1
Overview
Self-hosting means running those services on hardware you own instead of paying a provider. The appeal is control and privacy; the costs nobody mentions up front are electricity, keeping the box online 24/7, and a real backup plan. To reach it from outside your house you typically set up port forwarding on your router — often paired with dynamic DNS — so requests find the server even as your home IP address changes.
Home servers range from a single-board computer sipping a few watts to a repurposed desktop or a small rack in a closet (“home lab”). What they share is that you are the operator: there is no provider to page when a disk fills or a service crashes, which is both the point and the burden.
Where it fits
Choosing the first box is mostly a power-versus-capability trade:
| Option | Power draw | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi / SBC | ~5 W | File shares, small sites, sensors | Limited CPU & I/O |
| Old desktop PC | 40–100 W | Media, VMs, heavier apps | Electricity, noise |
| NAS appliance | 10–30 W | Bulk storage with RAID | Less general-purpose |
A single-board computer or an old PC gathering dust makes a great starting point: cheap, low-power, and enough for file shares and small sites. In GopherTrunk terms a home machine can do both jobs at once — capture RF from an attached dongle and store and serve the decoded data, which a remote VPS cannot.
Sources
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Self-hosting (web services) — Wikipedia, on running services on hardware you own. ↩