I got into self-hosting earlier this year after building my first NAS, and what started as a fun little hobby quickly turned into an addiction. The more apps I added to my Docker stack, the more value I got from the relatively small amount of money I spent putting everything together.

For a long time, I've recommended an off-the-shelf NAS unit for anyone that wanted networked storage in their home. For a few hundred dollars you could get a device that worked and then add whatever storage you'd like. It wasn't necessarily the most cost-effective way to build the setup, but it was extremely easy.

Subscription fatigue is real. It feels like every useful app now locks its best features behind a monthly fee, whether you're streaming music, organizing your media library, or automating repetitive tasks. But this weekend, instead of signing up for another recurring payment, replace those subscriptions with these free, open-source alternatives (FOSS) and save some money in the process.

Self-hosting is really a hobby in itself. Once you get the bug, it's hard to stop adding more and more self-hosted services or spending even more money on your home lab setup. Self-hosting also makes several hobbies possible that wouldn't really work without it.

Are you ready for another batch of fun (and useful) homelab projects to try out this weekend? From building your own speed test server to some media server maintenance, here are three projects for you to finish before Monday rolls around.

When it comes to single-board computers, you have other flavors of Pi to choose from than just Raspberry these days. The Orange PI series of competing products might lack the vast community support and software library of the Raspberry Pi, but when it comes to one specific use case, the choice is much less clear.

Pi-hole is one of the simplest and most useful things you can set up on your home network. It acts as a DNS sinkhole that blocks requests to domains associated with known ad servers or trackers. This gives you a far better browsing experience, but if you're only running a single instance of Pi-hole, things can go wrong.

Subscription creep is a real problem. It is one thing for $20 a month, and then another for $5, and before you know it, you're forking over hundreds monthly for services you might not even use. If you have a Raspberry Pi sitting around waiting for a project, you can turn it into a small self-hosting hub that can replace several subscription services as long as you take the right precautions.

BitWarden is a fantastic password manager, but if you're averse to recurring costs (especially in the form of subscriptions), the recent price hikes could be difficult to accept.