KISS
The more complicated the machine the more chances for failure.
Remote management plus bare metal just works, it's very simple, and you get the maximum out of the hardware.
Depending on your use case that could be very important
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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After many failures, I eventually landed on OMV + Docker. It has a plugin that puts the Docker management into a web UI and for the few simple services I need, it’s very straightforward to maintain. I don’t cloud host because I want complete control of my data and I keep an automatic incremental backup alongside a physically disconnected one that I manually update.
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Depends on the application. My NAS is bare metal. That box does exactly one thing and one thing only, and it's something that is trivial to setup and maintain.
Nextcloud is running in docker (AIO image) on bare metal (Proxmox OS) to balance performance with ease of maintenance. Backups go to the NAS.
Everything else is running on in a VM which makes backups and restores simpler for me.
Bare metal is cheaper if you already have some old pc components layjng around and they are not bound to my host pc being on. My PC uses a 600W power supply to run while the old laptop running my Jellyfin + pihole server use like 40W.
Containerisation is all the rage, but in reality it’s not needed at all for all but a tiny number of self hosters. If a native program option exists, it’s generally just easier and more performant to use that.
Docker and the like shine when you’re frequently deploying and destroying. If you’re doing that with your home server you’re doing it very wrong.
I like docker, I use it on my server, but I am more and more switching back to native apps. There’s just zero advantage to running most things in docker.
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Not knowing about Incus (LXD). It's a life changer. Would never run any service on bare metal again.
Using GenAI to develop my Terraform and Ansible playbooks is magical. Also, use it to document everything in beautiful HTML docs from the outputs. Amazing.
You sure you mean bare metal here? Bare metal means no OS.