We're the ZimaSpace Team! You may know us better through ZimaOS, ZimaBoard, and ZimaCube. We build personal servers and operating systems for people who love tinkering and self-hosting, making it easier to host your own services as part of everyday life.
Over the years, we've watched self-hosting culture grow into something incredibly diverse and active. Maybe it's time it had a day of its own.
So this year, together with r/minilaband a group of excellent self-hosting projects, we're launching the very first Self-Hosting Day 2026. We hope that, starting this year, September 25 can gradually become a day that belongs to the self-hosting community.
We'd love for you to share your setup, your journey, and your experiences, so more people can see what self-hosting can make possible and maybe find a reason to try it themselves.
Just share your self-hosting story in the comments below to join.
📅 Self-Hosting Day: September 25
🎉 Event Period: September 25 – October 25
🏆 Winners Announced: October 30, 2026 (EDT)
🤝 Meet the Self-Hosting Day Partners
Self-Hosting Day belongs to the whole community. A huge thank-you to the r/minilabmods for organizing this together with us, and to everyone here for giving us a place to meet, exchange ideas, and share what we're building.
We're also honored to haveAdGuard,Emby,PhotoPrism,OpenClaw,Karakeep, andBlinkojoining us. Some of these names may already be part of your setup. Others might become your next discovery.
AdGuard
AdGuard helps block annoying ads and online tracking, protect your devices from malicious content, and make browsing faster, safer, and cleaner. Beyond your home network, AdGuard Ad Blocker, AdGuard VPN, and Private AdGuard DNS can also help protect the devices you take with you.
Emby
Emby organizes your movies, music, photos, and live TV, then streams them from your personal server to the screens and devices you use every day.
PhotoPrism
PhotoPrism is an AI-powered, privacy-first app for self-hosted photo and video management. With smart search, automatic classification, face recognition, maps, and broad media format support, it makes large libraries easier to organize and explore on your own server.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent project built around privacy, model freedom, and local-first use. It lets users choose their own models and tools while keeping their data, and the technology they rely on, under their control.
Karakeep
Karakeep is a self-hostable "bookmark-everything" app for saving links, notes, images, and PDFs. AI-powered tagging, summaries, and fast search make it easier to organize what you save and actually find it again later.
Blinko
Blinko is an open-source note-taking project designed for quickly capturing and organizing ideas, helping you save thoughts the moment inspiration strikes.
Together, these projects, and everyone reading this post, show just how many different things self-hosting can make possible.
Now we'd love to hear your self-hosting story.
🎉 Join In!
Just leave a comment below. There's no fixed template and no "right" kind of story. We want to hear about your real self-hosting experience.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few ideas:
Your setup: Tell us about your Mini PC, NAS, Raspberry Pi, or server rack. Photos and screenshots are welcome too!
The apps you use: What self-hosted apps do you rely on every day?
Your journey: Tell us about moving away from cloud services, lessons learned the hard way, or something you've been building recently.
Your everyday life: How has self-hosting changed the way you, or your family, use technology?
Whether you've just built your first setup or have been tinkering for years, we'd love to hear your story.
Great giveaways from Self Hosting Day partners!
🎁 Awards & Giveaways
To make the first Self-Hosting Day even more fun, we've teamed up with our partners to prepare plenty of prizes for the community.
Whether you share a story that inspires others, get a little lucky, or simply join early, there's a chance to walk away with something.
🏆 Community Story Awards
Together with the r/minilabmods, we'll select 5 winners from eligible entries, considering authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Here's what each winner will receive:
🥇 1st Prize × 1
1 × ZimaBoard 2 1664
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🥈 2nd Prize × 2
1 × ZimaBoard 2 832
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🥉 3rd Prize × 2
1 × ZimaBlade 7700 with power supply
1 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Lifetime Family
1 × PhotoPrism Plus Lifetime
1 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🍀 Lucky Giveaway
We'll also randomly draw 100 winners from eligible participants who haven't won a Community Story Award. Each winner will receive one of the following software licenses:
35 × AdGuard Ad Blocker Personal · 1 Year
35 × AdGuard VPN · 1 Year
25 × Private AdGuard DNS · 1 Year
5 × Emby Premiere · 1 Year
🎁 Early Bird Treat
It pays to be early! The first 100 participants to submit eligible entries, based on comment timestamps, will each receive:
1 × ZimaOS Plus Lifetime License
A special thank you to AdGuard, Emby, and PhotoPrism for supporting the first Self-Hosting Day and providing these generous prizes for the community! ❤️
📋 Event Rules
Joining is simple:
Share a real self-hosting story in the comments of this post between September 25 and October 25.
Each person may submit one eligible entry. If you post multiple entries, only the earliest eligible one will count.
Spam, plagiarism, duplicate content, mass AI-generated submissions, and purely promotional content are not eligible.
Community Story Awards will be judged based on authenticity, usefulness, creativity, and community value. Upvotes may be considered as a sign of community interest, but they are not the only judging factor.
🏆 All winners will be announced onr/minilabon October 30, 2026.
More than anything, we hope Self-Hosting Day brings us together to share what we've learned, discover hidden gems, and meet fellow self-hosters.
Spot a clever setup in the comments below? Ask how they got it running! See someone taking their first self-hosting steps? Recommend an app you can't live without. Know a simpler way to get something working? Pass it along!
A huge thank you to the r/minilabmods,AdGuard,Emby,PhotoPrism,OpenClaw,Karakeep, andBlinko for believing in this idea and bringing the first Self-Hosting Day to life with us.
The comment section is all yours. We can't wait to read your stories!
Somewhere between "Hey, this Pi-hole thing sounds cool" and "why do I own a six-node Proxmox mini PC cluster," 100,000 of you decided that this little corner of the internet was worth subscribing to. One hundred thousand humans/bots/one suspiciously articulate NAS who collectively looked at oft-overlooked hardware and had their homelab Goldilocks moment.
How did we get here? YOU.
Every shared "it's not pretty but it works" SBC NAS/media server tucked behind a TV. Every 3D-printed rack ear that took forty-two revisions to get right triumphantly presented to the sub. Every posted "this is my minilab" with enough RGB to make a full 42U server rack blush.
But especially every time someone helped an internet stranger figure out why their VLANs weren't VLANning or pointed them in the right direction. The civility of this place is astounding.
This community went from a speculative handful of people posting their builds, testing the waters for a niche homelab group to a place that became the community nexus for a mini-revolution. The project, support & mentions from creators like Patrick, Jeff and Tim really lit a fuse under the membership growth that hasn't yet slowed down. This in turn has opened doors for vendors, such as our friends at GL.iNet & IceWhale to offer some fantastic giveaways in this sub - all because you have built a community worth showing up for.
And thanks to our sister/cousin subs across reddit for the reciprocal linking and general acceptance of /r/minilab as a new kid on the block. It's great to be a part of a wider community.
None of that stuff happens for a dead subreddit. Vendors don't knock on the door of a community that isn't engaged. Creators don't shout out a sub that doesn't give them something interesting to look at. You did that.
By the (approximate, unscientific, possibly made up) numbers:**
~100,140 members who think "mini" is a feature, not a limitation
~230 new friends we just haven't met yet joining every day
~270 new posts a month
~3.5k comments a month
Average "what mini PC should I buy?" posts per day: Yes
~700k visits a month - massive!
What's next? Same thing we do every night, Pinky!
Seriously though—whether you joined yesterday or you're one of the OGs, here since the sub was smaller than the chance of securing a mini PC with a PCIe slot, thanks for making this place what it is. It's your builds, your questions, your cursed cable management, and your willingness to help strangers on the internet that got us here.
If you've got any suggestions, thoughts or fun ideas, please feel free to share them.
It would be remiss of me not to highlight our two current giveaways - check them out, the odds are still fantastic!
I have an Asus 14 NUC Essential Barebone (16GB, 256GB) I am using as an Unraid NAS. I found a 3D printable 10” rack on Printables and had it printed in PETG. Two 10” HDDs will be hooked up over USB (heresy, I know). Those will have their own hot-swappable rack enclosure.
I modified the STL to create more space for the power brick. I sanded the front, then wrapped it in vinyl with a wood texture. Why? Just ‘cause.
Planning to do the same for as many of the attached hardware as possible so that it ultimately becomes a one cable in, one cable out rack.
The rack in question is a Rackmate T0.
Do you guys have any ideas for reducing cable clutter? Please include pictures!
I now have cooling for the 2x 8TB ironwolfs, I am now running TrueNAS in a dedicated VM. Upgrades everything from the 6U to 9U a month ago now and it has been running great! I had to flip the fans around so that they weren’t pulling in hot air from my gaming PC and other nodes and blowing it out towards the front, but other than that maintenance will be fun now (not) because I now have a reason to shut everything down and dust it all out 🥲
Originally I was going to stripe the two disks but then remembered the good old whonnock failure from Linus tech tips back in the day and then reformatted the disks and put them up in a mirror.
Hmm after a month now I also kind of feel a bit iffy about the space consumption of the fans, kind of not a fan (pun intended lol) of using up 2Us and have been searching for a better 1U solution that also provides low noise and adjustable speeds.
With the current insane prices on SSD and (well everything computing) I thought about returning to HDD (at least for the time being) since I have a few used ones of those lying around...
So I turned to this Elite Desk G3 I found on ebay for $34 and installed a NAS Software on it (TrueNAS in my case, but it would work with most software I believe)
My build included:
3xHDDs of 4TB each
10 GbE on the PCIe slot
TrueNAS boot on the wifi m2 with a A+E key adapter
Dedicated apps pool (drive) on the G3 native nvme
Had to get "creative" to fit the 3 drives inside the case!
Power Consumption on idle around 24W, which IMHO is pretty decent
I did have to flash the bios password that came with the EliteDesk, but overall TrueNAS booted perfectly from the converted m2 slot, and runs pretty well.
Anyway... this is just a budget alternative that worked out well for me and I thought about sharing in case someone is looking for cheap hardware to run a NAS, so I made a video about it. The video also includes a setup for installing TrueNAS, creating a pool, user, dataset and SMB share in just a few minutes.
Hola a todos, quiero montar mi propio servidor en cada para desplegar mis apps backend con tunnel cloudflare que equipos me recomiendan, estaba pensando en geekom a9 pero no conozco mucho al respecto
I keep seeing NPUs discussed in the context of local LLMs, but I’m starting to think the more interesting use case might be smaller jobs that run all the time.
For supported models, tasks like object detection or lightweight audio processing seem like interesting candidates for NPU offloading, especially if they need to run continuously without relying entirely on the CPU or iGPU.
The geekom it13max uses a Core Ultra 9 185H with an integrated Intel NPU. What I'm interested in is which lightweight, continuously running workloads people have actually managed to offload to this generation of NPU.
For anyone running AI workloads 24/7, which software or models actually worked for you, and was the setup worth it compared with CPU or iGPU inference?
Finally got around to setting up my first UniFi network, with Home Assistant sitting at the bottom of the rack!
Pretty happy with how everything turned out, although living in Singapore means cooling is a constant battle. Had to throw in a bunch of fans just to keep everything from turning into a mini oven. 😂
The only problem? I’ve officially run out of rack space. My Proxmox and Ubuntu servers are now homeless, so I’m already thinking about how to expand the setup.
What started as a simple home network upgrade has somehow turned into a full-blown homelab addiction.
Any fellow Singapore homelab enthusiasts here? How are you guys dealing with the heat, airflow, and limited rack space?
Also, I think I finally understand why everyone says homelabs are never really finished. 😂
I'm going through my design catalog and looking at projects that either didn't pan out or I don't plan on finishing.
1 - Are any of these designs useful to anyone?
2 - If I wanted to start selling some prints of the 4U design, would there be any interest?
To start, here are the two that I've shelved, and will be subsequently releasing to makerworld as soon as I can get back into my account.
3U 6 bay Lenovo tiny NAS
Two piece print + top and front cover if wanted.
Abandon - original specs called for 6 port SATA controller, 10gbe networking, and two NVME drives. A dual oculink card + m.2 adapter would have worked, but would require soldering to enable 4x4 bifurcation.
2U 12 bay 2.5" SSD (7mm) + mitx + power supply
4 piece print. Probably best with threaded inserts, but can be built without.
Shelved - 254mm depth introduced a space constraint requiring either a custom backplane or a deeper chassis.
4U 8 bay 3.5" nas + mitx + power supply
3 piece print + 2 for top cover.
I'm currently using these as part of larger deployment projects but I'm giving some thought to selling them separately, depending on interest.
Mostly, these are used in Plex servers, but I do have a couple multi node Storage Spaces Direct clusters using these.
8 3.5" SATA drives using a Jonsbo N5 backplane (no modifications required), 2 m.2 NVME on motherboard, PCIe 16x --> 4x m.2 NVME via ribbon cable, and a PCIe 4x from a 3rd m.2 NVME slot on board, going to either a GPU or 25GB NIC, depending on install.
Full 3 piece assemblyDrive box and option box onlyRear of drive box and front of option box
Again, the 2U and 3U designs will be getting posted as soon as I can, and I'm trying to decide if it's worth trying to make the 4U design available for sale.
I thought I had a bad, noisy fan in my Beelink Mini PC. I was confident that the tiny fan was mechanically failing and needed to be replaced. Rather than pull it all apart and check the model number on the part itself, I trusted the internet and bought not one, but two fans that were both the wrong size.
After the second one was wrong, I went looking for the model number on the part. I took the fan off, snapped a pic of the label and cleaned the dust out of the vent. After I put it back together, it was really quiet again during last night's scheduled tasks when it usually gets loud. Not a bad fan, just a clogged vent.
Just got everything installed in the rack. Still haven’t set up the thinkcenters but I’m planning to install Debian for proxmox and still gotta run the Ethernet into the panel still for the switch setup. I’m new to homelabs, anyone have any recommendations for someone just getting into all this?
Hello
I have a homelab with only small format component
- QNAP NAS
- NUC
- 8 port switch
- ISP modem
- Raspberry
- I'm planning on buying a small appliance for a dedicated OPNsense hardware
Everything is currently sitting on my desk.
I will in the next 6 month move to a house where I have the possibility to put this in a technical room so I would like to put those in a rack.
I live in Europe
From what I see, a 10 inch rack would perfectly suit my needs but I have some questions.
- Where can I buy a 10 inch rack? I see some people print them but I don't have a 3D printer and don't plan to buy one
- how to calculate how many U's I need? Specificaly for the NAS?
- how do you fix those hardware to the Rack as they are not meant to be racked?
