Created: 2025-08-06
Last Updated: 2026-02-01
Stage: seedling
Home Lab in 2026
With the AI hype train going full speed ahead, the cost of computing hardware suitable for homelabs has risen sharply. Similar to cryptocurrency tech bros previously, AI tech bros are placing increased demand for GPUs and RAM leading to a sharp rise in prices and a similarly sharp decline in availability. Given these demands, I’m wondering if running a homelab in the cloud is cheaper than purchasing my own hardware. I like the idea of using elastic computing resources for experiments and terminating them when I’m done. At the same time I’m concerned about the potential for cost overruns and the effort required to maintain systems deployed in a public cloud. That said, some of the tier-2 cloud providers have less expensive pricing options compared to the big three hyperscaler public cloud services providers.
Self Hosting
I am interested in moving away from commercial SaaS applications and self hosting the tools and applications I need. However, I see lots of challenges to doing so. The obvious challenge is the cost related to provisioning, operating, and maintaining my own infrastructure. There is less obvious challenge around the skills needed to build and maintain the infrastructure and applications.
Most commercial cloud providers are too expensive for home use. A cloud bill that is several hundred or thousands of dollars a month isn’t sustainable for most families.
Similarly, I suspect most families only have one person who has the skills needed to maintain the self hosted systems. If something happens to that person that prevents them from being able to work on those systems, the rest of the family is stuck.
Community Hosting
This could be an opportunity for some sort of community non-profit or co-op. A community group could pool the skills of multiple computing professionals to build and support systems, and provide cloud-like services at or near cost. The two challenges I see for this model is getting enough skilled people to volunteer to maintain the systems, and coming up with a plan to ensure users don’t abuse the system.
A good article on community hosting: The Future is NOT Self-Hosted
