ProHomeLab is open to authors who want to share their knowledge and practical experience in the world of homelabbing.
If you’re building your own home infrastructure, experimenting with servers, virtualization, containers, networking, NAS, monitoring, or automation, I’d love to feature your experience on the site.
It doesn’t matter how big your home lab is. What matters isn’t the number of servers in the rack, but real experience, interesting solutions, and knowledge worth sharing with others.
What you can write about#
The topics ProHomeLab covers are fairly broad. For example:
- building and growing a homelab;
- server hardware and its configuration;
- Proxmox, virtualization, and containerization;
- Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes;
- NAS, ZFS, Ceph, and storage systems;
- home networking, VLANs, routing, and firewalls;
- reverse proxies, DNS, and SSL/TLS;
- monitoring, logging, and backups;
- home infrastructure automation;
- self-hosted applications and services;
- information security;
- Linux and other server operating systems;
- migrating services and infrastructure;
- breakdowns of interesting projects and architectural decisions;
- practical how-tos and troubleshooting;
- your own experiments and their results.
This is far from an exhaustive list. If you have an interesting topic that isn’t on this list, write to me anyway.
What makes for interesting material#
First and foremost - practice.
You don’t have to write a fundamental guide spanning dozens of pages. A good article can cover a single specific task, even a narrow one: how you configured something, what problem you ran into, what options you tried, and what solution you ultimately settled on as the best for your case.
Material where the author explains not just “how to do it” but also “why I did it this way” is especially valuable.
Writing about mistakes is fine, even encouraged. A failed experiment, a non-obvious problem, or an unexpected limitation sometimes turns out far more useful than a perfectly polished tutorial. I’ve had plenty of those myself…
Requirements for submissions#
Articles are only accepted in Markdown format.
Ideally, the material should:
- be written independently and with minimal AI assistance (I know pretty much everyone uses AI to some degree these days, but trust me, I can recognize AI phrasing);
- be based on the author’s real experience - this is the most important thing;
- contain concrete examples and/or technical details;
- let the reader reproduce the described actions, if it’s a how-to;
- not just be a translation or retelling of someone else’s article - if it is a translation or retelling, which is fine, a link to the original source is mandatory;
- not contain hidden advertising or promotional placements without prior agreement;
- not be about circumventing blocks and restrictions imposed by Roskomnadzor.
If the article contains commands, config files, or code, they should be formatted using standard Markdown.
There’s no strict length requirement. A short but substantive article is better than a long wall of filler text.
Before publication, the material may be edited for language, structure, and formatting. The technical content, the author’s approach, style, and voice will not be changed.
What to provide along with the article#
To get published, you’ll need to provide:
- The article in Markdown format.
- The author name that will be displayed on the site.
- An author avatar - preferably a good-quality square image.
- A short author bio - optional. For example, what you do and what interests you in the homelab world - this will be shown in the list of authors (but, of course, only with your consent).
- Links to your site, GitHub, Forgejo, or other projects - if you’d like them listed in your profile.
The avatar and name are needed to properly credit authorship of the material on the site.
No commercial interest whatsoever#
ProHomeLab is a non-commercial project.
I don’t make money from the site (right now I only have expenses - hosting and the .com domain name) and I don’t plan to monetize it - at least, there are no such plans for now. There are no paid posts, paid link placements, or any hidden commercial terms for authors.
So this invitation to collaborate is exactly that - an invitation to share knowledge and experience, not an attempt to get some commercial benefit out of an author.
There’s no catch here: if you have interesting homelabbing material you want to share, I simply want to, and can, give it a platform and introduce it to other enthusiasts.
That said, if an article mentions specific products, services, or companies, that’s not a problem in itself. What matters is that the material reflects the author’s real experience, rather than being disguised advertising.
How to submit material#
The simplest option is to reach out to me and send the article in Markdown along with author information.
If the material is already in a Git repository, you can just send a link to the repository or the specific file.
The way you send the material isn’t important - what matters is that the source text can be obtained in Markdown without losing formatting.
Authorship#
Every published article retains its creator’s authorship.
The author’s name is listed directly on the publication, and if you have relevant links, I can add your profile or links to your own projects.
I’m not trying to turn ProHomeLab into either a media outlet or a soulless knowledge base - in the 21st century, neither is really possible anyway.
Why this matters#
Homelab isn’t just about hardware and software. It’s above all about sharing experience.
Every project has its own quirks: someone built a server out of an old office PC, someone built a full-blown cluster, someone automated dozens of services, and someone found an elegant solution to a problem that stumped the best minds around.
Maybe your experience is exactly what will help someone save time, avoid a mistake, or simply inspire them to build their own homelab.
