If I had to guess how many self-hosting homelabbers utilized IaaS, I’d say it’s very slim. Don’t get me wrong. I love seeing your homelabs on r/homelab! But did you know that you can utilize IaaS like us to take your self-hosting and home lab to the next level? I started NodeSpace because I had a home lab way back in 2006. I had three physical servers – Active Directory and DNS, secondary DNS, and an internal Linux web server. In these days, virtualization was only for enterprises and the hardware from the late 90s and early 2000s didn’t support virtualization – or at least not very well. If you wanted to host stuff at home, you basically needed a physical box for each service. There were no containers, either. And this was also the time where if you wanted an SSL cert on the Internet, you needed a dedicated IP address for it. Today, we have it easy. You can easily host stuff at home – but what if I told you that you didn’t have to cut providers like us out? I know, it seems like you’re saving money, but what if I told you we provided you some benefits?

We extend your home lab

It’s true – we can easily extend your home lab! We have some resources for your critical apps. How many times have you had to swap out bad RAM or failed drives? We do that for you! We’re also a great place when you want to learn something that you normally can’t do from home. Back in the day, I tried running an Exchange server from my home. That’s when I found out that most email services, like Gmail, flat out reject residential IPs. Since our IPs are enterprise IPs, they’re not blocked. You can easily run a mail server for your home, your business, or your friends and family. Unlike Google, we don’t read your mail for ads. We’re just happy as long as your invoice gets paid.

Using our data center for your critical services is also another great way to extend your home lab. If you have a service you do not want to ever go down, why not use one of our servers? I actually use one of our servers to extend my own home lab. It seems like everything works until you leave home. At least, that’s my luck. So instead of using my home lab as my VPN for when I’m out and about, I use my NodeSpace Proxmox Private Cloud. That way when my home ISP fails or my router crashes, I can still access my critical services.

I also know what it’s like when your rent goes up and you need to move. It’s never fun tearing down your home lab only to realize that now something you need (like maybe your own personal wiki) is now unavailable. If you had your most important servers in our data center, then they stay up!

Cheaper than the cloud

You may use cloud services like an ocean that’s digital or a very blue cloud or even set sail down a river in a particular rain forest in South America. But if you have several servers with them, you’re wasting money! $6 here, $12 there, it doesn’t seem like much but it adds up quickly. Why pay by the service when you can buy in bulk? A dedicated server is nothing more than cloud resources in bulk. And best of all, you have full control over it.

We also run specials and deals for diehard techies like yourself, so you end up saving even more.

We’re built for the self-hoster because we are self-hosters!

It seems very counterproductive, but we understand you because we are you! That’s why we have certain servers and our services are designed for self-hosting. Proxmox VE? We use it and love it! Docker? You betcha! We don’t do any weird things with our network or servers. Standard enterprise-grade gear, standard networking. You don’t have to mess with MAC addresses or need to follow complicated guides to get Proxmox working.

OPNSense, pfSense, Wireguard, OpenVPN, Plex, Proxmox, Docker, nginx reverse proxies… we speak the same language and therefore we’re willing to go above and beyond to help you out should you get stuck. Not that you would get stuck because we do things normally, but it’s always good to know that we’re here to help you.

So let’s get hosting!