A small server on my desk
Why I run Proxmox at home.
In the corner of my desk there is an untidy pile: one machine running Proxmox, a few small boards, loose hard drives, and more cables than I remember owning.
Why bother
The cloud makes almost everything easy, and that is exactly the problem when the goal is to learn. When a provider handles networking, storage, and recovery for you, you never really meet the parts that can break.
A homelab reverses that. Nobody handles anything for you.
What I got out of it
A lot of what I now do at work I met here first — virtualisation, networking, storage, and the habit of proving something can be restored before calling it done.
As a bonus, it is the safest place to break things.