TLDR: for a number of reasons, I’ve decided to no longer host external-facing services in my homelab right now as a high school student. Most crucially, my Gitea instance of 3y (git.benhays.org) has gone dark as of 13:00, 2026-09-17.
Over the past three years of operation, I’ve made a lot of progress in my homelab.
I started with the standard services: Gitea, Pi-hole, Tailscale, etc. I experimented with Infrastructure-as-Code using Ansible and Terraform. I ran massive networking labs using Cisco Modeling Labs and GNS3 for the CCNP. All the while my trusty Dell PowerDdge worked without complaint or failure.
It still has never quite given up, but when my migration to a new RAID 5 setup encountered some hitches, I found myself ready to let go of a part of my lab.
Upon booting up the rack after the migration, I found that the disk images for most of my VMs had been corrupted. I could probably have gone through the long and tedious process of recovery, but my busy senior year had already made the choice for me.
My Git repositories were fortunately already backed up on GH and strewn across multiple laptops. The rest of the data was seemingly inconsequential enough to be wholly ignored. Now I just had the choice to rebuild my previous setup or go anew. For a variety of reasons, I chose the latter.
Ultimately, I chose to grealty scale back on my lab and remove all publically-accessible services.
Number one, exposing services to the internet is a real PITA. I don’t mean the process of getting them up–Cloudflare Tunnels are absolutely wonderful, and I have never had to bother with NAT passthrough or Dynamic DNS. Rather, keeping them up, secure, and spam-free is the real issue.
Gitea is probably one of the easier things to keep safe, just update once and a while and put a competent WAF in front and things will probably be fine.
For hobbyists and students (like me!), the value proposition and risk modeling skews greatly towards the negative. It’s not that I can’t properly operate and manage a bustling homelab, it’s more that I don’t want to undertake said efforts.
It is furthermore difficult to truly quantify the burden of having to worry constantly about the state of one’s lab, even when the only consumer is yourself.
My websites–both personal and for clients–are all hosted via Cloudflare Pages (for free!), which made the choice much easier than it could have been.
How do other IT people on the internet handle it? Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.