I set up a home server after years – why?

This summer I bought myself a new toy: a small but powerful Minisforum MS-A2 computer, which I turned into my own home server. Not because commercial cloud services are bad – but because I wanted to better understand what I could do myself, under my own control, without ongoing monthly billing.

For years I ran a server at home in a big ATX case, serving as a network drive and hosting websites in development. Later I bought a separate Synology NAS, and site development largely moved to cloud servers.

Now, however, it felt like the smartest way to try new applications and services was to install them on my own machine. It certainly helps that, thanks to the current fiber optic boom, an extremely fast and reliable connection arrived at my home a year ago – so I can also serve home server services to the public internet if needed.

What does the home server run?

First, I installed Nextcloud – an open source alternative to Google Drive, Dropbox, and similar services. Nextcloud works brilliantly for both file synchronization and privacy: files stay at home, but are accessible on all devices. I sync photos, documents, and other files from my phone and tablet.

The second important piece I wanted to test is n8n – an automation server that lets me build workflows without writing much code. For example:

• Pick up a receipt PDF from email
• Read it with OCR to extract searchable text and embed it in the PDF
• Move the PDF file to a year/month directory so it's easy to find later

Like Zapier or relay.app, but under my own control.

Why on earth?

Someone might ask, why go through the trouble when you could handle it with commercial services?

Three reasons:

Privacy. I want to know where my data is and who has access to it. Now it's at home – physically. Of course, I've automated backups from this server and they actually end up offsite too, but that's a topic for another article.

Learning. It's a different thing to tinker with something on your own VPS versus actually running a continuously operating service that's part of your daily life.

Autonomy. I can build exactly the kind and size of system I need – without limitations.

What's next?

There are plenty of future plans. For example, I'd like to:

• Set up version control for configurations (e.g., Git + Ansible)
• Build comprehensive monitoring and statistics visualization for all home services
• Continue developing home automations, such as electricity consumption and price tracking

Home server – not just for nerds

This project has been surprisingly rewarding for me. It has combined technical tinkering, practical benefits, and a sense of ownership in just the right proportions. If a home server interests you even a little – I warmly recommend trying it. It doesn't have to be expensive or complicated. You just need to want to do a bit yourself. In principle, you can get started with almost any old machine gathering dust in the corner without a better purpose.