Service planning
Place self-hosted services where failures are easy to understand.
A homelab service plan should show which workloads are infrastructure, which workloads store data, and which workloads are experiments. HLBuilder turns that plan into nodes, virtual machines, and network connections.
Group services by blast radius
- Infrastructure services include DNS, reverse proxy, monitoring, authentication helpers, and backup tooling. Place these on hosts that are easy to restore.
- Data services include storage, sync, media libraries, and databases. Put them near the storage design and verify backup paths in the diagram.
- Experiment services include test containers, lab clusters, gaming servers, and short-run projects. Keep them away from the services that make the household network work.
Use the service library as a planning input
The HLBuilder service library includes categories such as media, networking, monitoring, storage, management, home automation, gaming, and other services. Favoriting services turns a vague app list into a plan that can be mapped onto hardware nodes.
Custom services help when the catalog does not include a workload. Add the name, description, resource estimates, and source links, then decide whether the service should stay private or be submitted for community review.
Service placement checks
- DNS can restart without taking down the machine needed to repair it.
- Reverse proxy rules point to stable internal addresses.
- Monitoring can still report when a media host or experiment host fails.
- Backup targets are not on the same host as the only copy of the data.
- Public services are separate from experiments that change often.
How this maps into HLBuilder
In the visual builder, a compute node can hold virtual machines or containers. Add service names to the host that will run them, then review the IP layout and topology. This makes it easier to catch a service placed on a disconnected node or a host with the wrong role.
Common questions
Where should self-hosted services run in a homelab?
Run network services on reliable infrastructure hosts, keep storage services close to storage hardware, and place experiments away from DNS, backups, and authentication.
How does HLBuilder help with service planning?
HLBuilder connects service choices to hardware nodes and the network topology, so the service plan can be checked against compute, storage, and IP layout.