A homelab is a place to conduct experiments in a safe newtork environment. If you work in IT your not alowed to configure production equipment (servers). A homelab is an environment to build a "production" server at home, that becomes our lab. You can buuild a Plex media server environment or just use the homelab as general cloud stockage for data files or computing tasks. Homelabs provide a way for people to learn more about topics like server technology through experiments.
The sky is the limit. Thats why they call it the cloud. You could Virtualise the home lab server and create multiple virtual machines on one piece of hardware. Deploy a homemade firewall or VPN solution, Build a mail server or web server. Create a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device or run a database server to store large amounts of data with mysequal or Mongo DB.
A home server can cost a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. It all depends on what server configuration you would like to make and how much data storage and processing power is needed. You can use tools to calculate the average cost for this on-premises configuration vs a homelab configuration. Ideally if you do not want to use your home server a homeab is a great solution. If you would like to host your data quickly at the lowers price possiable then a solution like AWS could be best for you.
A home server is nothing more than a computer that is dedicated solely to storing and serving commonly used files, such as media files, web files, or larger databases. Instead of storing your photos and music and videos files on all your computers individually, a homelab could store all those media files in one place on the home lab server.
The average cost to rent a small business server is $100 to $200/month. For purchasing a server, it may cost between $1000-$3000 for a small business. The cost of a small business server will depend on how much CPU, bandwidth, disk space, and memory is required. Check out our Resources page for more tools on how to buy the best home server.
To install an operating system onto a HP proliant rack server takes a couple steps. The first step is to choose if you will be installing an operating system os or if you would like to vertualize the server hardware to make many smaller digital machines. To install an OS you will need to download an ISO file from one of the operating system providers, Linux has many options to choos from like ubuntu or mint. You could also choose to use a Windows os if you would like. Once the ISO file is downloaded to your computer you can use a program like batch etcher to configure the USB drive so when the USB drive is plugged into the server the server knows to install the IOS file onto the local homelab machine (You can not just put the ISO file onto a usb drive without configuring the USB drive first).