>Think of a home lab as a place where you can fail in the privacy of your own home.
This is the exact opposite of my thinking.
I want my experiments to happen on a remote server I don't care about...not on my home network that I really don't want to compromise/open up by accidentally misconfiguring something.
VPS are cheap - I'm paying like 7 bucks for a 16 gig / 4vcore. (Admittedly a once off deal). 7 bucks to have the blast radius of my networking noobness somewhere else seems like a bargain.
For me, part of homelabbing is learning the entire stack from physical layer up. I learn a lot of stuff running on my own physical hardware that I would have never learned when using someone else’s hardware with many nines of uptime.
I have a reference point for how my software runs on real enterprise hardware. I know what unexpected things my software does when various hardware/VM/network issues arise, and I’ve learned ways around them and how to write better software that takes these edge cases into consideration.
Are you really full stack if you didn’t reflash the firmware on your RAID controller? When I say I’m full stack, I really mean it. :)
That said, I do keep separate VLANs for my “test” and “prod” environments here at home to keep frustrations at a minimum.
There's been a lot of failure over here. I'd break my home server almost daily while tinkering. Now that it's been rock solid for about a year I kind of wish it would break and give me a problem to solve.
This is the exact opposite of my thinking.
I want my experiments to happen on a remote server I don't care about...not on my home network that I really don't want to compromise/open up by accidentally misconfiguring something.
VPS are cheap - I'm paying like 7 bucks for a 16 gig / 4vcore. (Admittedly a once off deal). 7 bucks to have the blast radius of my networking noobness somewhere else seems like a bargain.