Servers@Home: Homelab Usage Survey Results

Servers@Home has published the results of its first annual Homelab Usage Survey, based on responses from 217 people in its community. The results offer a useful snapshot of what today’s homelabs actually look like, from the platforms and hardware people choose to the number of services they run and how they connect from outside the house.¹

A few results stand out. Media servers are nearly universal, Immich has become surprisingly common, and local AI is already showing up in a meaningful share of respondents’ setups. TrueNAS and Proxmox dominate this particular audience, while VPN-based remote access remains the preferred way to reach services from outside the home.¹

The more interesting part, though, may be where people are still struggling. Networking, safely sharing services, hardware costs, backups, security, and simply understanding increasingly complex setups all appear repeatedly in the responses. The survey also gives a sense of how those challenges change as people gain experience and start running larger homelabs.

It is a relatively small, community-specific survey compared with efforts such as selfh.st’s larger annual self-hosting survey, but that also makes it an interesting look at one particular corner of the homelab world.² The questionnaire itself was built using the self-hosted OpnForm project and its MCP integration, adding another small self-hosting story behind the survey.³

There are considerably more numbers, charts, and respondent observations in the full results than are worth reproducing here. If you run a homelab, or are curious what other self-hosters are actually doing with theirs, the original article is worth reading through.