Discover why tech enthusiasts are trading massive enterprise server racks for streamlined setups. In this guide, explore how downsizing your **home lab** and adopting modern **self hosting** strategies can save power, cut maintenance time, and maximize your favorite apps.
The Rise of the Leaner Home Lab
Here is where I think we can still be excited about **self hosting**. Before, it might have been the cool thing to do to have racks and racks of enterprise gear. But I think the reality of the times with hardware pricing and availability make us realize that we can still have fun and do cool things with less hardware than we may have thought we needed.
Especially when you start looking at containerizing your workloads, you don’t have to have a lot of RAM to run applications. Many of us are looking at what we can consolidate onto the same machine. In reality, most of us don’t need more than one machine running our containerized applications.
Audit and Downsizing a Modern Home Lab
We may have had multiple nodes simply to have what we would run in production enterprise environments and have failover, high availability, or running things like Ceph HCI storage. We don’t have to have that in play to have a resilient and meaningful **self hosting** environment.
If you are interested though in Ceph HCI, you can still do this, even with mini PCs. Check out my post here: I Built a 5-Node Proxmox and Ceph Home Lab with 17TB and Dual 10Gb LACP.
To know if this is a viable solution for you, monitor your current home lab footprint for a week. Do you have boxes that are sitting idle most of the time? Is there room there for consolidation? Also, when you consolidate, you are also saving on power. Take a look at what your lab draws at the wall. These will give you baselines of “low hanging fruit” to make things more efficient. Keep in mind that even when you eliminate 30 watts of power in your lab, that amounts to about 263 kWh for a year if your servers run around the clock.
Mini Labs and Compact Hardware
This is also where I want to call out that I think mini labs, specifically 10-inch size racks, are really taking off. I personally have downsized from 19-inch gear in terms of servers down to the 10-inch mini rack that now houses my Minisforum MS-01s that I am running with my Proxmox cluster.
Below is an example of the Tecmojo mini rack that I am currently sporting in the home lab. There are many brands and vendors to choose from:
Tecmojo 10 inch rack for home lab
The 10-inch rack for me houses my 5 MS-01s and also a 10 gig TOR switch and the gear for my cabling, power distribution, etc. These have really become the sweet spot for those downsizing and exploring smaller footprint racks.
Run More Apps Inside Containers and Less Full VMs
If at all possible, run your apps inside containers. This helps with the overall footprint that you need to run your applications in the home lab. A Linux VM running Docker on Proxmox gives me a place to run a LOT of services together. So, in a traditional environment where you may have had one app per VM, with containers, you may have a dozen containerized apps for a single VM. This results in orders of magnitude savings when it comes to resources.
When it comes to patching and maintaining your lab as well, which some have wanted to downsize, this results in easier maintenance and lifecycle operations which also equals time back. There are still apps that may need their own VMs due to the way they are written or other requirements they may have specifically. But, if you treat these as “one offs” instead of the standard way you run your apps, the entire lab footprint will benefit.
Also, I feel like running things in containers is easier than ever these days. We have more container tools than before. We have Docker, Podman, LXC containers, and OCI image support now directly in Proxmox. Also, with the help of AI agents, Kubernetes is now easier than it has ever been to manage and run applications inside of.
Check out my recent guide on the options to run containers in Proxmox: Complete Guide to Proxmox Containers in 2025: Docker VMs, LXC, and New OCI Support.
Also, in my opinion, the time and energy to manage containerized apps is less. With virtual machines, we had to worry about taking care of all the prerequisites and dependencies with our applications. We were responsible for upgrading all the dependencies on our virtual machines. But with container images, all of these are packaged with the application itself.
With tools like Komodo, Dockhand, Arcane, and others, we also have really great tools for managing our Docker container’s lifecycle activities.
Pets vs. Cattle Approach
I think it is also important in the goal to downsize your lab that you adopt the mindset of “pets vs. cattle” when it comes to hosting your infrastructure. This means that you don’t view your Docker hosts as anything special. But instead, you look at them as cattle. This means that any configuration that lives outside the container’s compose file is not needed.
This gets us away from the old days of having artisanally crafted docker server hosts that we treat as pets. These types of docker server hosts may have app-specific packages installed on the host, scheduled jobs, and one-off scripts on each host that lives outside the docker-compose configuration.
When you have this approach related to your containers and how you run them, then you can much more easily downsize as there is nothing special about your docker hosts per se. This also makes it easier if you decide to consolidate where your workloads run as we mentioned earlier.
Powering Down Workloads That Aren’t Needed 24/7
I think increasingly as well, running a 24/7 home lab may not be something that ones are realistically wanting to do “just because,” especially for workloads that may not be needed while they are asleep. More and more ones are using automation to power down workloads or even the hosts themselves, or both to save on power consumption, heat output, noise, etc.
I have looked at many neat automated solutions for powering down workloads. A good example of one of these solutions that I have tried out recently is a tool called DockerWakeUp. It allows you to have an automated way to spin down containers until the first request for its resources, then it is spun back up: I Stopped Running All My Docker Containers 24/7 and Do This Instead.
Upgrades Are Not As Important
I think this is a good learning point for most of us. I think for many of us, myself included, we upgraded to upgrade. There wasn’t a real need to do this. But since I know a lot of us enjoy new hardware and faster speeds when new generations of things come out, this is probably something all of us have been doing when realistically, we didn’t have to.
Running even a semi-current mini PC gives you a LOT of CPU horsepower and capabilities that most of us don’t realistically use in the home lab. RAM is still limited, but most of the current mini PCs can expand out to 128 GB of DDR5 memory if we can afford it. But the point is, we don’t have to upgrade most likely and can make do with semi-current hardware that we have lying around or have already been using.
Adding new gear is equally as offsetting when it comes to pricing. Even the comparatively “cheap” SBC devices like Raspberry Pis have seen significant jumps in pricing. Raspberry Pi has raised the price of the 16 GB Pi 5 to $385 on November 2.
Realistically with the price increase here, unless there is a good reason to spend the money on a Pi, I would just first choose to host it on a mini PC or workstation I already have. This will save you from another device that needs to be patched and another source of power draw in the home lab.
FAQ
- Question 1: Why are self-hosters downsizing their home labs?
Answer 1: Many tech enthusiasts are scaling back from multiple enterprise servers to single mini PCs or compact 10-inch racks to save on electricity costs, reduce heat and noise, and spend less time maintaining hardware and more time actually using their applications. - Question 2: How do containers help reduce home lab resource usage?
Answer 2: Running applications inside containers (via Docker, Podman, or LXC) allows you to pack dozens of services onto a single Linux VM or machine. Unlike traditional setups where each app demands its own virtual machine and redundant OS overhead, containers bundle dependencies directly with the application, drastically lowering resource requirements. - Question 3: Is it practical to keep a self-hosted server running 24/7?
Answer 3: Not always. Many modern self-hosters are using automation tools like DockerWakeUp to spin down idle containers or servers when they aren’t in use. This “on-demand” approach cuts down significantly on annual power consumption and wear-and-tear on your equipment.
