After two years of hoarding services, I finally cleaned up my homelab — and it feels incredible

Published Jul 23, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek, Joe has been writing about technology since starting his career in 2018 at KnowTechie. He's covered everything from Apple to apps and crowdfunding and loves getting to the bottom of complicated topics. In that time, he's also written for SlashGear and numerous corporate clients before finding his home at XDA in the spring of 2023. He was the kid who took apart every toy to see how it worked, even if it didn't exactly go back together afterward. That's given him a solid background for explaining how complex systems work together, and he promises he's gotten better at the putting things back together stage since then. Two years ago, my home lab was in full expansion mode. Every week brought a new LXC on the Proxmox cluster, another Docker container on the Synology NAS, another subdomain in Technitium DNS. If a self-hosted project hit the front page of r/selfhosted, I was spinning it up by the weekend. It felt like progress, and honestly, it was fun. This year, I've mostly been deleting things. Not because the services failed, but because I finally admitted that every one of them was a tiny job I'd assigned to myself — updates to apply, backups to verify, dashboards to glance at guiltily. The lab I actually rely on turned out to be maybe a third of what I was running, and the rest was inventory pretending to be infrastructure. Every service is a maintenance contract you make with yourself Nobody reads the fine print at 2 a.m. The thing about self-hosting is that deployment is the fun part, and it's also the shortest part. The docker compose up takes five minutes. The relationship lasts years. Every container I added came with an invisible rider: keep it patched, keep it backed up, keep it from quietly filling a volume with logs, and remember how it works when it breaks eighteen months from now. Individually, none of that is hard. Collectively, it's a part-time job. I'd sit down to actually use the lab and instead spend the evening chasing an update that broke a reverse proxy config, for a service I'd opened twice since Christmas. Sure, automation helps; watchtower-style auto-updates, scheduled ZFS snapshots on the fastpool; but automation doesn't reduce the surface area. It just makes the surface area quieter until it isn't. The test I use now is blunt: if this thing broke silently tonight, how long until I noticed? For Home Assistant, the answer is minutes — the wall panel in the kitchen goes dark, and the whole house tells on it. For a good chunk of what I was running, the honest answer was "possibly never." That's not a service. That's a liability with a hostname. Consolidation killed more containers than deletion did My NAS was already doing half of this The second realization was more embarrassing: a lot of my services duplicated capabilities I already owned. I was running a standalone file-sync container next to a Synology that syncs files for a living. A separate dashboard app to monitor things Home Assistant was already monitoring. A notification relay when Home Assistant has notifications built in. I'd deployed solutions to problems that were already solved one rack unit away. So, instead of asking "what's the best tool for this job," I started asking "what's already running that can absorb this job?" Time Machine backups moved onto the ZFS pool via a single lightweight container instead of a dedicated appliance-style VM. DNS-level ad blocking lives in Technitium, which I was running anyway, so the standalone blocker went in the trash. Monitoring collapsed into Home Assistant, because it turns out the platform that watches my air quality is perfectly happy watching my disk health too. The counterintuitive part is that consolidation made each surviving service more valuable, not less. Home Assistant went from "smart home toy" to the nervous system of the whole lab. The NAS went from "storage plus a pile of Docker experiments" to storage done properly. Fewer things, doing more, understood deeply. My brain vibes with that a lot more than a sprawl of single-purpose containers I half-remembered deploying. What survived tells you what your home lab is really for Spoiler: It's not for running services After the purge, what's left is short enough to hold in your head: Proxmox for the VMs I genuinely use, the Synology for storage and backups, Technitium for DNS, Home Assistant for the house, and the Pangolin ingress stack to reach it all from outside the CGNAT prison. Everything on that list earns its keep daily, and everything on it would be missed within the hour if it vanished. And that's the real lesson. The survivors weren't the coolest projects or the ones with the prettiest dashboards. They were the ones other things depended on. My lab, it turns out, isn't a hosting platform — it's a small set of load-bearing utilities plus a sandbox for whatever I'm writing about this month. The sandbox is allowed to be chaotic, because sandbox experiments now come with an expiration date instead of a subdomain and a promise. Okay, I haven't achieved total minimalist enlightenment here. There's still a test VM or two I keep meaning to flatten, and I will absolutely spin up something ridiculous the next time a project catches my eye. The difference is that "delete it" is now the default outcome instead of the unthinkable one. A smaller home lab is a home lab you can actually trust The strange payoff of deleting half my lab is that I trust the remaining half completely. Updates are quick because there are fewer of them. Backups are verified because there's less to verify. When something breaks, the suspect list is short. The lab stopped being a collection I curated and became infrastructure I rely on, and I'd argue that's what most of us wanted when we started — we just took the scenic route through forty containers to get there. If your Proxmox node is groaning under services you can't remember deploying, try the silent-failure test on each one. Anything that fails isn't your home lab. It's just cargo. Delete it, take the snapshot first if you must, and enjoy how quiet things get.