I recently was lucky enough to be given an old PC by a friend (since they had no use for it) and it gave me the motivation to set up a homelab, something I've thought was interesting for quite a while now but never really seen enough value in to drop some real money on. I mean, this "old PC" is really rather good. A 3070Ti, i7 10700K, 32GB DDR4, 4TB storage. By no means is that a bad machine and I would never buy a PC this high-spec just for a home server, nor would I buy a traditional PC either. But, this is what I got given, and it's damn good for what I'm using it for.

There are sooooooo many different things you can host on a homelab, with so many of them getting praise, and so many getting slandered… But, what ones are actually worth it? Well, I've now tried quite a lot of them, sooooo… Here's my list of the ones that made the cut, or didn't:

What made it.

Plex

Plex is just so good for hosting your home media library, it takes everything you have, shows, movies, you name it from your personal library (for me all of my ripped DVDs, Blu-Rays and CDs), which I have heaps of. It gives you your own streaming service. This wasn't my first time using Plex, I'd already been using it for over 2 years just hosted on my main PC, but now it has a permanent home and won't shut down when my PC does. This is a must-host for me, but it all depends on what you need, if you don't need a personal media server, you don't need it.

Jellyfin

One sentence summary: it's basically the same thing as Plex. Lengthened summary: it's less restricted by default. Plex has it's "Plex Pass", restricting features like hardware encoding and remote streaming, whereas Jellyfin gives you these things for free. Currently, I'm hosting both Jellyfin and Plex together, using the same library. But Plex does take the cake for ease of use, Jellyfin is just more technical and won't be as fun for the less technical members of your family, like grandparents or non tech-savvy friends.

Home Assistant

Your personal home hub. It controls all of your smart-home devices, and it's completely free-and-open-source (yes you FOSS lovers! it is!). It acts as a central hub for all of the devices, saving you having to navigate between the Govee app, Nanoleaf app, Philips Hue app. Most importantly for me, alongside it's mobile app (for which this kind of app already exists, albeit not open source), it has a web UI, which is a lifesaver for me. Instead of having to get my phone out every time when I'm at my desk, I can control all of my lights and speakers from my PC's browser. It also has it's own AI assistant that you can set up with an API of choice or even self-host on the same server, however I don't use it so can't comment on its quality.

Dynacat

This is one I just happened to stumble across on GitHub and one that I haven't seen talked about much. It's a fork of a more well-known service called Glance, which I'm sure some people will have heard of. It acts as a sort of personal homepage, giving you all the information about how your server and it's containers are running at a glance, see what I did there? Yeah, I'm sorry… Alongside that, it can show the latest videos from your favourite YouTubers, the latest Hacker News, the weather, provide easy access to what you want to bookmark and more. It even has extra widgets you can add which make the possibilities almost endless. Truly a must-have for me. (I also love the cat branding haha)

YTPTube

A simple one, yet a necessary one. It's a self-hosted frontend for yt-dlp (the best YouTube downloader!) that allows you to see your download history, keep videos you want to watch later downloaded and more. It works really well and gives you access to all the tweaks you might need easily, without even having to touch a command line like yt-dlp would typically require. Thanks to Paradoxically for recommending this one! I love it!

What didn't.

Immich

A self-hosted alternative to something like iCloud Photos, Google Photos, etc. You get the gist. Whilst I love the idea, it adds so much friction to something that I like to be as easy as possible. It suffers from the same faults as every other third party file backup software on Apple devices (which most of my devices are, so that's important). The ease of use that comes with using something like iCloud (on iPhone/Mac) or Google Photos (on Google Pixel) just isn't there with Immich. Oh, and the storage space that photos take up you wouldn't believe. It would be nice as an extra backup, but I just don't need it. I'm sure someone does, I don't.

Pi-Hole

I loved the idea of a network-wide ad blocker, just imagine a world where there's no ads on your phone, your computer, your TV, all without any extra software running on them. But it just isn't there. Firstly, it means all network traffic on your network runs through your homelab, which also means that if your homelab is down, so is your entire WiFi network… Along with that, it doesn't even block the most annoying ads! It's unable to block YouTube Ads, Reddit Ads and more, any ads hosted on the same domain as the content (which is just a side effect of it being DNS-based, but makes it pointless for me). Sure it blocks those pesky mobile app ads and those LG webOS dashboard ads, but it just isn't worth the risks involved if your server goes down. No thanks!

Ollama

I enjoyed using local AI that was able to be, well, not local. It meant that my main PC resources can be untouched whilst still having all the benefits of local AI. But, it reminded me just how demanding local AI is and the reason it had to run on my main PC in the first place. It also gave me a swift reminder that the 3070Ti only has 8GB of VRAM, and it made me pay for it… I think it's pretty self explanatory, you need a pretty big beast of a PC or a specifically AI-based PC setup for it. I just don't have that and it isn't worth it for me. If I need local AI, I'll stick to doing it on my main PC like I was previously. It's good for someone, again, I'm not that someone.

So, that's it. Yet another essay of a post, I know and apologise, I like to yap I guess. Hope this helps someone out there, or is at least an interesting read.