One of the best aspects of home labs is that they are versatile enough to accommodate practically any device, be it tiny Single-Board Computers and mini-PCs to storage-centric NAS rigs. As such, you can build your first server without relying on the shiniest enterprise-tier hardware that money can buy.

That said, you don’t necessarily need to stay on the same device after you’ve gotten your feet wet in the server ecosystem. Once your computing projects start to go past certain performance and complexity thresholds, you might need to upgrade the paraphernalia comprising your experimentation lab.

You’re running out of storage space

Self-hosted services can consume terabytes of data

Storage provisions may get overshadowed by processors and memory capacity in home server discussions, but it’s easily one of the most essential aspects of your tinkering station. If you’re into hosting your own services, you can easily choke huge hard drives just by deploying media server apps. My Jellyfin, Immich, and RomM instances hold terabytes worth of movies, tv shows, images, and ROM files, and my Calibre-Web and Kavita containers continue to grow in size as I buy more ebooks and comics. Then there are NVR tools, which can generate gigabytes in footage every day.

Likewise, virtual machines can end up occupying a considerable amount of space, especially if you’ve deployed dev VMs running on your home lab like I did. Throw in the extra storage capacity you’ll need to back everything up (preferably to a dedicated NAS), and you’re bound to need a lot of HDD space. Should you ever find your home server or backup NAS running out of storage even after clearing out the non-essential files and virtual guests, perhaps it’s time to start checking out more hard drives.

Your network stack feels too slow

2.5G and 5G hardware is surprisingly cheap

1 Gigabit isn’t all that bad when you’re starting out on your home lab journey, as you can achieve satisfactory performance on this affordable networking standard. But considering that a single high-quality hard drive alone can saturate a 1GbE connection, you may find your projects throttled by 1G speeds once you start expanding the scope of your home lab.

Luckily, modern SBCs and mini-PCs have started shipping with 2.5G Ethernet ports, and the same holds for budget-friendly NAS units. So, if you find your transfer speeds throttled by the 1G connection on your network stack, it may be time you bought a new switch and cables. 10 Gigabit network equipment still tends to be on the expensive side, but 2.5G and even 5G switches have become quite affordable as of late.

You need better fault tolerance

Adding a few nodes should do the trick

When you’re experimenting with home labs, things can (and will) go wrong. And I don’t just mean a virtualized service or two refusing to run. If you’re not careful, you could easily bring down the entire self-hosted stack with a misconfigured YAML file. Of course, learning from mistakes is an essential part of a home server, but there are times when you’d want your essential apps to continue running or risk the other members of your house barging into your room with pitchforks and torches when the media server breaks for the umpteenth time that week. Yes, I speak from experience.

As such, it’s a good idea to add some fault tolerance to your home lab, and there are a couple of ways to do so. If you’ve only got lightweight self-hosted services that you consider essential for your daily tasks, you could offload them to a cheap Raspberry Pi SBC or an N100 system. But for tinkerers who rely on as many VMs and containers as I do, it might be a good idea to go for a high-availability cluster instead. Ideally, you should go for a minimum of three workstations, but if you’re using Proxmox like me, you can use an Arm system like Raspberry Pi as a QDevice to maintain quorum when your primary system gets taken off the radar by a botched experiment.

Your server has unreasonably high energy consumption

Old devices aren’t very energy-efficient, after all

Repurposing old PCs into makeshift NAS and VM-hosting servers is pretty much how most tinkerers (including yours truly) get into the home lab hobby. Not only does it save you money you’d otherwise have to blow on new hardware, but it also stops that retired machine from gathering dust.

Unfortunately, old PC components tend to have worse energy efficiency than their modern counterparts. And the power consumption is off the charts for server-grade systems you’d typically find for dirt-cheap prices. So, if your energy bills tend to hit the red zone even after turning down certain performance settings, it might be time to bid adieu to your electricity-guzzling rigs and replace them with their power-efficient descendants.

Your hardware can barely run virtual machines

If you can’t upgrade, you can pivot to a container-only setup

Containers are quite useful for home labs, as they let you run a host (pun intended) of useful services inside decently isolated environments without siphoning too many resources from your server. However, there are cases where you’ll need to go for virtual machines instead, whether it’s for dev environments or hopping between different flavors of Linux.

But since virtual machines tend to consume too many CPU and memory resources, it’s entirely possible that your old champ is a little outdated to run VMs. This is something I realized after attempting to convert a decade-old laptop into a Proxmox workstation earlier this year. While I eventually turned it into a reliable LXC-hosting rig, I would’ve invested in a mini-PC if I didn’t already possess a dedicated server.

Just keep your budget in mind when looking for home lab upgrades

Outfitting your tinkering lab with better hardware can enhance your computing projects, but it can also become rather addictive. Once you’ve got better networking equipment, it’s easy to want to go for something even faster, and the same holds for storage drives and server nodes. If you’re not careful, you can end up breaking the bank on new hardware that you ended up buying simply because it felt too good to pass up on. Source: Yours truly, who has zero hope of escaping from the home lab addiction.