There is a lot of popular home lab advice out there that gets repeated and it starts sounding like absolute truth. But after years of running virtualization clusters, Kubernetes environments, self-hosted services, enterprise hardware, and modern mini PC platforms, I’ve changed my mind on some of the advice given to home labbers that is touted as “best practices”. In this video, I break down seven pieces of home lab advice that I no longer follow. This includes running everything on Kubernetes, implementing high availability for every service, buying enterprise hardware by default, self-hosting everything, over-monitoring your environment, constantly upgrading hardware, and always deploying the latest software releases. I’ll explain why keeping things simple is always the best approach.
Read the full written blog post here: https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/06/i-no-longer-follow-this-popular-home-lab-advice/
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:01 Everything should run on Kubernetes?
02:31 You need high availability for everything
04:03 Enterprise hardware is always better
05:30 More monitoring is always better
07:03 Self-host everything
08:18 Just buy more hardware
09:36 Always deploy new technology immediately
10:39 Simplicity with a purpose
11:45 Final thoughts and discussion
