I like self hosting . It’s not just about privacy or owning something. To me a homelab is also a hobby. No different than previous generations that tinkered with their cars as a hobby. As someone who works in IT - there are also ancillary benefits. What I learn at work, I apply to my home lab and vice versa.
Two quick examples that I can think from the recent past - I work in a fairly tech conservative IT environment for mid-size industrial company. We're slow to adopt lot of industry trends. So when containers became popular in the mid-2010s, we pretty much stayed away until around 2020-2021. I've been running containers in my home lab for years and had a very grasp of building and deploying containers. So I was able to drive that change and also pass on that self-gained knowledge to many on team that were to new to the concept.
Another example - for years we were mostly a Oracle shop. With some SQL Server thrown in. But management wanted us to trim our annual licensing cost. So we switched a lot of our in-house applications to Postgres. I was using Postgres for years at home and had gained a lot of experience with it. So again, it was an area I was able to contribute a lot when transitioning away Oracle and Sql server.
On the flip side there are things I learned at work, that I was able to bring home and apply to my home lab. One being Ansible and other being network segmentation. Specifically around using VLANs and access control
