In this documentation we cover some questions you may have as you explore our unique service. You may also find our Getting Started Guide insightful as you begin your journey.
HomeLab Host is a transitory network service provider, enabling simple external connectivity to your servers from anywhere! By placing your server behind our virtual private network, you can open services and ports on a public IP address, even in a variety of situations where this would otherwise be impossible, such as behind CGNAT or while running the server on a network where you do not have full firewall control.
HomeLab Host is a network services provider designed to provide a simple and secure front-end to homelabbers who want to make public their projects that they are hosting at home. If you want a full service hosting provider, our parent company is a VPS provider! You can check us out at epecservers.com.
HomeLab Host is not a full service hosting provider, we are only a network services provider designed to provide a simple and secure front-end to your servers hosted at home. We do not store any data for you, we are not that kind of hosting provider. If you want a full service hosting provider, our parent company is a VPS provider! You can check us out at epecservers.com.
HomeLab Host proudly provides unmetered bandwidth, in partnership with our parent company epecservers.com, which also provides unmetered bandwidth on its VPS services.
With the fact in mind that most of our users are using their home Internet connection as a backend, we believe we do not need to enforce a specific bandwidth limitation on our users. The amount of bandwidth able to be used on a typical home connection is just not high enough that we feel a hard limit is necessary.
If you feel that you have special bandwidth requirements, or are concerned about your potential use case, feel free to contact us! If we feel that you are using more bandwidth than our shared service can sustain, we'll contact you and work with you to find a more dedicated solution.
If you would like more information, please consult our Unmetered Bandwidth Policy.
At this time, EPEC Servers and HomeLab Host have not taken any enforcement action against any user.
Yes! Your servers can be located anywhere. If you're able to connect to our VPN - you're good! If you aren't sure, try our starter plan and see.
Some networks, such as certain cellular networks, school campus networks, or office networks may block you from connecting to our VPN service. We are not able to assist you in circumventing such restrictions. You should use Homelab Host from a network that you own and control.
Yes! Our service is able to work in many scenarios where typical server hosting wouldn't. Carrier grade NAT (CGNAT) is no problem. As long as the network does not block your outbound connection to our VPN service, you're good to go!
We do not advocate for violating your ISP's acceptable use policy, and we accept no responsibility for any consequences if you choose to do so.
With that out of the way, HomeLab Host is designed in a manner that most technical restrictions which would prevent running servers will be circumvented.
Traffic between you and HomeLab Host is encrypted, and will look like VPN traffic. You do not need to open any ports in your firewall, and no external connections will be made to your home IP. As a result, if your ISP is looking for servers through conventional means, our service would not be detected by these methods.
Your ISP could still decide to take action against you for violating other policies, like uploading excesisve amounts of data, but HomeLab Host is much less likely to trigger enforcement action by your ISP than conventional server hosting methods.
If you want to run servers at home, HomeLab Host is currently the safest way we know of to do it.
HomeLab Host is designed with security in mind. Our service does not expose your IP address at home, and we only forward specifically configured traffic to you.
Using HomeLab Host is safer than opening ports in your router firewall, thereby directly exposing your IP address and home network.
However, you are still exposing a server at home to the Internet. HomeLab Host cannot protect you from vulnerabilities in software and website code. For example, if your server is running outdated software or vulnerable website code, exploit attempts through our proxy may still be possible.
The only limiting factor for operating system support is our VPN connectivity. We use Wireguard for our VPN backends, which supports all major operating systems. You can find specific installation instructions here, and for operating system specific WireGuard support, the best details are available on their website.