HomeLab & Cloud Infrastructure

Why I Built This

I got tired of deploying everything to managed cloud services without understanding what was actually happening underneath. Every tutorial I followed said “just push to Heroku” or “deploy on Vercel,” and while that works, it felt like driving a car without ever opening the hood. I wanted to understand networking, virtualization, storage, and system administration from the ground up, not just as abstract concepts but as things I actually configured and maintained.

There was also a practical motivation. I was building more and more projects that needed hosting — web apps, APIs, databases, development environments — and paying for managed services for each one was adding up. What if I could host everything myself, learn infrastructure in the process, and have a platform ready whenever I needed to deploy something new?

What It Does

The setup is a self-hosted cloud built on Proxmox VE running on dedicated hardware, combined with a fleet of VPS instances for public-facing services. Proxmox handles virtualization, letting me spin up VMs and containers for different workloads without them interfering with each other. Each project gets its own isolated environment with dedicated resources.

The VPS fleet handles anything that needs to be publicly accessible. I set up reverse proxies, SSL termination, DNS management, and automated deployments so that pushing code to a repository triggers a build and deploy pipeline. Services like DisasterScope, StudyPlatform, and AUDIT.LOG all run on this infrastructure.

On the networking side, I configured VLANs to segment traffic between different types of workloads, set up monitoring and alerting so I know when something goes down, and built backup routines that run automatically. The whole system is managed through SSH and configuration files rather than GUI dashboards, which forced me to get comfortable with Linux administration at a deeper level.

Impact

Building and maintaining this infrastructure taught me more about DevOps than any course or certification could. When something breaks at 2 AM, there is no support ticket to file. You diagnose it yourself, fix it, and then figure out how to prevent it from happening again. That cycle of breaking things and fixing them built real operational intuition.

The practical payoff has been huge. Every project I build now has a production-ready hosting environment waiting for it. I understand container orchestration, network security, storage management, and system monitoring not as buzzwords but as things I configure and maintain daily. When I work on application-level code, I think about infrastructure implications automatically because I have been on the other side of the stack.

Most importantly, this project gave me confidence that I can own the full deployment pipeline from code to production, which is a skill that carries into everything else I do.