🏠 Own your data. Skip the monthly bill.

Your own cloud.
Running at home.

A home cloud is a small server in your house that does what Dropbox, Google Photos and Netflix do — file sync, photo backup, media streaming — with no subscription and full control of your data. Here’s what it takes, from a $120 starter box to a full home lab.

Compare the three builds How setup works
🗂️

Files & photos

Sync files across devices and auto-back-up phone photos with Nextcloud or Immich — your own private Dropbox and Google Photos.

🎬

Media streaming

Stream your movie, music and TV library to any screen in (or out of) the house with Jellyfin or Plex.

🏠

Smart home & more

Run Home Assistant, ad-blocking for the whole network, password managers, game servers — anything self-hostable.

How a home cloud is set up

Every build — basic or extensive — follows the same four steps. The tiers below just change how much hardware and software you layer on.

1

Pick the hardware

A single-board computer, mini PC or NAS. It sits on a shelf next to your router and stays on 24/7 — most draw less power than a light bulb.

2

Add storage

One external drive for basics; mirrored (RAID) drives for anything you can’t afford to lose. Rule of thumb: buy double the space you think you need.

3

Install the software

Free, open-source apps do the work: Nextcloud for files, Immich for photos, Jellyfin for media, Home Assistant for the smart home. Most install in an afternoon.

4

Reach it from anywhere

Tailscale or WireGuard gives you secure access from your phone or laptop anywhere in the world — no ports opened to the internet.

Dig deeper: every app and how to install it →

Three ways to build it

Pick by budget and appetite for tinkering. Every tier lists the equipment you’d actually buy, with typical prices.

Basic

The starter box

File sync + photo backup for the family

$120–250
one-time hardware · ~$1/mo electricity
Equipment
Raspberry Pi 5 kit (8GB)
Board, case, power supply, SD card
~$120 Amazon ↗
External USB drive, 2u20134TB
Your storage u2014 plug and play
~$70 Amazon ↗
Ethernet cable
Wired beats Wi-Fi for a server
~$8 Amazon ↗
What you can run
  • Nextcloud — private Dropbox for the household
  • Immich — automatic phone photo backup
  • Pi-hole — network-wide ad blocking
  • Light media streaming to 1–2 devices
Setup timeAn afternoon
Skill neededFollow a guide
Most popular
Medium effort

The proper home server

A real NAS with protected storage

$450–900
one-time hardware · ~$3–5/mo electricity
Equipment
Mini PC (Intel N100/N305, 16GB)
Or a 2-bay Synology/QNAP NAS
~$220 Amazon ↗
2u00d7 6TB NAS drives (mirrored)
One drive can fail, data survives
~$260 Amazon ↗
USB drive enclosure, 2-bay
Houses the mirrored pair
~$90 Amazon ↗
UPS battery backup, 600VA
Rides out power blips safely
~$75 Amazon ↗
What you can run
  • Everything in Basic, faster and for more users
  • Jellyfin/Plex — full media server with hardware transcoding
  • Home Assistant — smart home hub
  • Docker — dozens of self-hosted apps at once
  • Tailscale — secure access from anywhere
Setup timeA weekend
Skill neededComfortable tinkering
Extensive

The home lab

Rack-grade storage, VMs, room to grow

$1,200–3,500+
one-time hardware · ~$8–20/mo electricity
Equipment
4u20136 bay NAS or custom TrueNAS build
Ryzen/Xeon, 32u201364GB ECC RAM
$600u20131,500 Amazon ↗
4u00d7 10u201316TB NAS drives (RAID-Z)
Tens of TB with redundancy
$700u20131,400 Amazon ↗
2.5/10GbE switch
Fast transfers between machines
~$120 Amazon ↗
UPS, 1500VA + NVMe cache SSDs
Clean shutdowns, snappy apps
~$300 Amazon ↗
What you can run
  • Everything in Medium, at scale
  • Proxmox — virtual machines and containers
  • GPU transcoding, AI photo search, local LLMs
  • Off-site backup replication to a second box
  • Game servers, CCTV recording (Frigate), the lot
Setup timeSeveral weekends
Skill neededEnthusiast

Prices are typical street prices as of 2026 and will vary. As an Amazon Associate, setup.cloud may earn from qualifying purchases — at no extra cost to you.

What it costs to keep running

The hardware is one-time; these are the honest ongoing costs a cloud subscription would otherwise hide.

$1–20/mo

Electricity

A Pi draws ~5W; a big NAS 40–120W. At $0.15/kWh that’s a dollar to twenty a month, tier depending.

~$0–12/yr

Domain / dynamic DNS

Optional. A personal domain makes remote access tidy; free dynamic-DNS services also work.

$0

Software

Nextcloud, Immich, Jellyfin, Home Assistant, Proxmox and Tailscale (personal) are all free and open source.

Every 4–6 yrs

Drive replacement

Hard drives wear out. Budget replacing them roughly twice a decade — RAID means a failure is an errand, not a disaster.

Not ready to run your own hardware?

Compare 17 public cloud providers side-by-side and let someone else keep the servers running.

Compare cloud providers →