Honest tradeoffs — not evangelism.

What you gain

1. Control — where data lives, how apps connect
2. Customization — automation, webhooks, your rules
3. Skills — real troubleshooting, not only tutorials
4. Family platform — media, files, chat for people you trust

What it costs

1. Time — updates, incidents, documentation
2. On-call responsibility — you fix outages
3. Security work — patching, exposure, backups
4. Hardware — power, noise, drives

When cloud is better

1. Email at scale, global CDN, compliance you can't audit alone
2. I want zero ops — pay for managed SaaS

Hybrid is normal: use Cloudflare (or similar) for DNS and DDoS; self-host the apps you care about.

Full curriculum: Homelab Academy (invite) · Public summary on nbottini.com

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