My Home Server on Proxmox: What I Learned Building It From Scratch

It started with a simple idea: I wanted my own space where I could set things up, break them, and fix them without consequences. Proxmox was the choice because it offers virtual machines and containers in a single panel, and it also teaches you to think about resources: how much RAM, how many cores, where the disks are located.

What's Running On It

A few virtual machines for experiments and a separate container for services that just need to run. On top of that, Docker, because most things are quicker to spin up as an image than to configure manually. Backups run automatically on a schedule, because I once lost a configuration and didn't want that to happen again.

Three Key Takeaways

First: the network is always the first suspect. Before I started digging into a service, it usually turned out the problem was with the bridge or IP addressing.

Second: if something doesn't boot, logs know more than intuition. I learned to read them backward and look for the first error, not the last one.

Third: it's worth documenting what changed. A simple note file saved me more time than many tutorials.

This isn't enterprise infrastructure, and I'm not pretending it is. But when I see a hypervisor, a VM, or a container at work, I'll know what I'm looking at.