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Self-Hosting, Homelab, and Home Assistant
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HowTo Geek ☛ Give Your Self-Hosted Services Local Domain Names With This Pi-hole Trick
Are you tired of memorizing your self-hosted services IP addresses and ports? I was, so I figured out how to use Pi-hole and Nginx Proxy Manager to give my services local domain names without exposing them to the internet.
Local Domain Resolution vs. External: What’s the Difference
When you type a domain name into your browser like, say, https://howtogeek.com, your browser will try to resolve that domain to know where to direct you.
External resolutions come from when a website can be accessed from outside its local network. When you access How-To Geek, you’re accessing a server in a data center somewhere that’s on an external network compared to your home’s local internal network.
However, if you host a service at home like, say, Audiobookshelf, and access it via its IP address, then you’re accessing a local website. You can also set up a service that will let you access those locally-hosted websites with a domain name, without ever having to leave your local network.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Why 2.5Gb/s Networking Is the Sweet Spot for Your Homelab
Are you tired of data transfers taking forever on your local network? I was, so I set out to figure out what networking upgrade made the most sense for both me and most people. I started by thinking about 10 gigabit, but quickly realized that 2.5 gigabit networking is the true sweet spot in 2025.
Gigabit Networking Is Becoming Slow for Local Networks Back in the mid-1990s, 100Mb/s networking, also known as Fast Ethernet, was the fastest networking available. However, it only stayed around for about three years before Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mb/s) took over as the standard.
Since 1999, Gigabit Ethernet has been the industry standard for home networking. Many internet service providers offer internet speeds of gigabit, too. It has become ubiquitous in our modern age.
Gigabit Ethernet is now 26 years old, as hard as that might be to believe.
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HowTo Geek ☛ I Ditched Google Keep for This Self-Hosted Note-Taking App
Once you have the server running, you need to make it accessible from the internet. Typically, you'll be advised to use a reverse proxy for that. However, in this situation, I think that is unnecessary, especially if this is the only thing you're hosting.
Instead, I'd recommend running a lightweight VPN, which allows you to connect to your home network from anywhere in the world and access devices on your local area network as if you were sitting right next to them.
Since the Joplin server will, by default, be accessible to devices on your local network, you can use a VPN to connect to it without exposing anything else to the internet.
I like WireGuard for this since it is very easy on system resources, but you could use OpenVPN instead. Both are secure and widely supported.
I hosted my WireGuard server on a Raspberry Pi 4, which is the same device I use to host the Joplin server.
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HowTo Geek ☛ Home Assistant Is the Answer to Your Smart Home's Biggest Issues
The smart home vision is a bold one, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone. “Some people just want a light switch,” as a colleague recently put it. But many of the drawbacks of a modern smart home can be overcome, and the answer is Home Assistant.
Home Assistant is a free and open-source smart home server that runs locally on a dedicated device within your home. While it’s not yet the perfect solution that it could one day be, it’s worth a second glance for anyone interested in building a resilient, dynamic, and truly useful smart home.