Home servers are on the rise and if you can host your services yourself, you will benefit in several ways. Besides saving on the monthly costs for subscription services or a rented virtual server from a hosting service provider, regaining your data sovereignty can be an important motivation. The data stays where it belongs: on your network. Of course, this requires a configuration that takes security seriously.

With expert knowledge, you could build a home server from scratch and run the required services on it using Docker. But deployment-ready solutions such as Proxmox or Unraid will help you achieve your goal in a far easier way. The catch is that they still require a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, at least during the setup phase. CasaOS [1] shows that there are also lean solutions that offer everything many users need. You can preview a demo version of the system on the website. I have tested the software on a Raspberry Pi 5, but a Raspberry Pi 4 should work fine as well.

No Operating System

Shanghai-based IceWhale Technology Ltd. develops CasaOS for its own ZimaBoards [2], which have attracted a kind of cult following over the past year. The name CasaOS is somewhat misleading, as it suggests that it is an operating system. However, CasaOS is actually a browser-based graphical user interface that requires an operating system to be in place.

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