Gear I use

Everything on this page is genuinely running on my homelab. If it's not on here, I haven't used it.

Affiliate disclosure: the links in the first section are affiliate links (marked *). If you buy through them I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what I recommend — I only list gear I actually run.

Hardware I buy

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Mini PC (32GB) *The whole channel runs on this — Proxmox host, local LLMs, n8n, the lot. No dGPU needed.~$400 2TB NVMe SSD *VM disks + model weights fill up fast. 2TB is the sane floor — though NAND prices are ugly right now, so buy what you need, not extra.~$220+64GB DDR4-3200 Kit (2×32GB) *RAM is the real homelab bottleneck once you stack VMs and models — 64GB is the comfortable floor. Buy the cheapest reputable DDR4-3200 kit; no need to pay up for RGB or ultra-low latency here.~$150+6TB 7200RPM HDD (512MB cache) *The cheap-per-terabyte tier: bulk media, photo originals, and local backups live here on spinning rust, so the fast NVMe stays free for VMs and models. 7200RPM keeps it usable, not just an archive.~$120+

Good suggestions

Tools and services I run and recommend — no affiliation, no commission. Just what actually works.

Hetzner CloudWhen something has to face the internet, it goes on a cheap Hetzner box — never the homelab.from ~€4/mo Backblaze B2Off-site backup target for the homelab. S3-compatible, dirt cheap egress.$6/TB/mo Namecheap DomainsWhere the side-project domains live.~$10/yr Proxmox VEFree, open-source hypervisor. The foundation every build here sits on.n8nSelf-hosted workflow automation — the Zapier replacement this channel keeps coming back to.