Why HomeLab Forge exists

HomeLab Forge is a notebook for building an affordable home lab. The goal is not a data center in a spare room. The goal is one reliable box that can run a few virtual machines, a file share, and later a small local AI model.

I am starting with Linux, virtualization, and self-hosting because those three skills stack. If the first machine is stable, everything else is just another service on top. If the first machine is a mess of unused cloud trials and half-finished tutorials, nothing ships.

This site will stay practical. Posts will cover what I would actually buy, what I would skip, and what broke. WordPress is the publishing layer. The lab itself lives on the hardware.

What I plan to cover

• affordable hardware
• Proxmox
• self-hosted tools I would keep running,
• local AI that does not need a rack of GPUs.