Nathan Reynolds

I built my first Plex media server with a single 2TB external drive shoved behind my desk, and it worked fine for about eighteen months. The library grew, I added more drives, and somewhere around year three I had four externals daisy-chained off a small N100 mini PC serving four simultaneous 4K streams to family … Read more

Running a NAS with mechanical hard drives only feels slow the moment you spin up a VM, query a database, or transcode multiple Plex streams at once. The fastest fix our team has found is dropping a dedicated NVMe SSD into the cache slot, where it absorbs the random-read and write-storm workload that HDDs handle … Read more

I built my first home lab server with a pair of SATA SSDs and quickly learned the hard way that random IOPS, not sequential throughput, is what kills or saves a virtualization platform. After watching my Proxmox node grind to a halt during a ZFS resilver, I switched to NVMe and never looked back. That … Read more

Building a workstation in means sorting through a flood of PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs that all promise the same jaw-dropping sequential speeds. After spending weeks testing eight of the top drives against real workstation tasks — 4K and 8K video editing timelines, complex 3D scene renders in Blender, and multi-gigabyte dataset transfers — I can … Read more

Your Proxmox boot drive is the single most important storage component in your homelab. Lose it without a mirror and you’re facing a full reinstall, lost configs, and hours of downtime. I learned this the hard way back in 2022 when a cheap consumer SSD died on me at 2 AM, taking my entire cluster … Read more

Running your own VPN on Linux used to mean wrestling with IPsec certificates and OpenVPN tunnels that dragged on slow VPS instances. In , the best VPN for a Linux self-hoster looks completely different. Modern WireGuard-based routers and gateways give you 900+ Mbps throughput, kernel-level encryption, and zero-trust mesh networking through tools like Headscale and … Read more

Finding the best VPN with port forwarding for self-hosting is harder than it sounds, because most consumer VPNs no longer offer port forwarding at all. After Mullvad dropped the feature and PrivateVPN removed it, self-hosters are stuck choosing between a shrinking list of paid services or rolling their own setup at the router level. I … Read more

If you’ve been hunting for the best WireGuard VPN service for Linux in , you already know the protocol is in a class of its own. WireGuard ships a tiny, auditable codebase, modern cryptography, and connection speeds that make OpenVPN feel sluggish by comparison. The challenge isn’t whether to use WireGuard – it’s getting it … Read more

I built my first self-hosted WireGuard VPN on a borrowed cloud VPS, and the moment I realized I was paying $7 a month for what was effectively a 512MB RAM box running a single binary, I started hunting for cheaper alternatives. That hunt led me to something the Reddit r/selfhosted crowd has been buzzing about: … Read more

Running your own email server starts with one decision that trips up most beginners: choosing the right VPS. The best VPS for a self-hosted mail server must allow outbound traffic on port 25, offer clean IP ranges, and provide enough RAM to handle SMTP, IMAP, and spam filtering without breaking a sweat. Most mainstream cloud … Read more