Homelab Media Box on Hetzner (16TB)
A home away from home for my data, media, and privacy.
Overview
I’ve always liked owning my media and my infrastructure. Renting cloud space or relying on streaming never felt right. So I built my own server: a bare-metal Hetzner auction box with 16 TB of storage and 64 GB RAM, running an orchestrated suite of self-hosted apps that power my family’s entire digital library — movies, books, automation, and more.
It’s cost-effective, private, and surprisingly elegant.
Why Hetzner
Running this at home wasn’t realistic. My local ISP gives me gigabit down but only 40 Mbps up — perfect for gaming, terrible for hosting 4K streams. Hetzner’s auction servers offered the sweet spot:
- Symmetrical bandwidth for multiple concurrent streams
- Dedicated Xeon E3-1275 V6 with Intel Quick Sync for hardware transcoding
- Refurb pricing far below cloud costs
That GPU alone can handle a dozen simultaneous 4K transcodes — better than my M2 Mac Mini ever could.
Stack Overview
| Layer | Tools & Services | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Media Servers | Plex • Jellyfin | Dual-system for redundancy and flexibility |
| Automation | Radarr • Sonarr • Lidarr • LazyLibrarian | Hands-off downloads and metadata management |
| Access & Requests | Jellyseerr • Wizarr | User requests, onboarding, and family invites |
| Torrenting | qBittorrent + ProtonVPN | Private, bandwidth-aware downloads |
| Edge & Management | Caddy • Portainer • Organizr | Reverse proxy, container orchestration, and unified dashboard |
| Storage & Hardware | 16 TB HDD • Xeon E3-1275 V6 • 64 GB RAM | Reliable, powerful, and inexpensive |
Principles Behind the Stack
- 🧩 Ownership + Convenience – Control the stack end-to-end without friction.
- 🔒 Privacy First – VPN-tunneled traffic and local user management.
- 👨👩👧 Family-Friendly – Simple, curated, multi-user access with Jellyseerr.
- 🧠 Documented Setup – So future-me can rebuild it fast.
- 💸 Cost-Effective – One flat Hetzner fee replaces every cloud bill.
Challenges & Choices
- Why not Proxmox? Hetzner doesn’t offer it as a recovery image, and by the time the base stack was live, it wasn’t worth wiping everything. I plan to migrate on my next hardware refresh — but the current Docker/Portainer setup has been rock-solid.
- Why not host at home? Upload speed. High-bitrate 4K content crushed my local network. Hetzner’s symmetrical connection solved it overnight.
Impact
- Hosts the entire family’s 4K media with zero buffering.
- Serves multiple simultaneous remote streams effortlessly.
- Centralized management with one-click container deploys.
- Monthly cost lower than a few streaming subscriptions combined.
Reflection
This isn’t just a server — it’s my personal cloud. It’s proof that with a bit of care, you can own your data, automate everything, and still give your family a Netflix-tier experience without surrendering privacy or paying the big guys.
Next stop: Proxmox and GPU passthrough. But for now, it just works — and that’s the best feeling in tech.
Tech Stack
Docker / Portainer, Caddy, Plex, Jellyfin, Jellyseerr, Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr, qBittorrent, ProtonVPN, Hetzner Dedicated, Intel Quick Sync