Initially called home servers, many Linux users amid the late 90s and throughout the 2000s were hosting a Samba server as an open shared file storage and printing alternative to Microsoft Windows Server. The home server trend faded around the 2008 economic recession and as cloud services became cheap alternatives with better redundancy.
Home servers began making a silent comeback in the mid-2010s due to the introduction of cheap single board computers, internet service degradation with inflating costs aka enshittification, and increasingly improving open source alternatives. The trend grew alongside the maker movement and affectionately got the name "home labs" due to its resurgence with the maker trend. The US and EU saw a massive increase of makerspaces during the 2010s1, alongside Learn to Code campaigns, tech layoffs. Despite this, many took the opportunities of the pandemic (r/homelabs had a peak rank of 279th top reddit in Dec 2020) and tech layoffs to start building their own home solutions to host open source. Laid off technical employees are feeling the increasing instability of the tech sector and are picking up homelabs to keep skills sharp and to learn and deploy open source technologies to replace others.
After a few slow years, homelabs exploded in 2020 when the pandemic saw economic uncertainty and a quick shift to working from home and finding new time to tinker all at once. Since almost everything you could do was online, self-hosting was an easy way to lower almost all of your costs.
Services continue to grow more costly, privacy invasive, and are designed as walled gardens which makes leaving a technology ecosystem a high economic, time, and social cost.
This includes many trained software engineers who started self-hosting these systems outside of work and writing about it for fun, but has increasingly grown in diversity in recent years with hobbyist who have no system administration or software engineering backgrounds, but are able to tap into the wisdom of these open source communities.
Market Research Future predicts a "growth from USD 6.81 Billion in 2025 to USD 12.53 Billion by 2034, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate of 7.20% during the forecast period (2025 - 2034)." [^3]
Some examples of homelab communities: