A small home server quickly grew from ad blocking to many services
The first goal was to run for home ad blocking and connect it to Unbound for local address lookup. The setup then expanded into password storage, , uptime checks, speed tracking, an ebook library, downloads behind a VPN kill switch, and a . The services include , a certificate, Vaultwarden, Tailscale, qBittorrent, Gluetun, Uptime Kuma, Netdata, Speedtest Tracker, DiscoPanel, Playit.gg, BookOrbit, and Homepage.
Each service gets its own subdomain under a personal domain. The machine is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q Tiny with an i5-8500T processor, 24GB of DDR4 memory, and a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive for the and containers. A 512GB SATA SSD is ready to be added for more storage.
A small desktop can grow from one simple home-network job into a broad personal server setup very quickly.
Key points
- The setup began with and Unbound for home ad blocking and local address lookup.
- It grew to include passwords, downloads, monitoring, speed tracking, ebooks, and a .
- Each service is reached through its own subdomain on a personal domain.
- The small PC has 24GB of memory and separate storage planned for more capacity.
- owners can use this as a checklist for domains, certificates, , monitoring, and backup planning.