I really dislike “the cloud” in most of its forms. Obviously, it hasn’t become this widely adopted by consumers and organizations for no reason; having somebody else manage the hardware your services run on is massively convenient for 99% of the people using those services. Now that platforms like AWS and Azure for corporations, and even services like Nvidia GeForce Now for gamers, have majorly streamlined their operations, it makes more sense than ever for more people to look towards the cloud to host applications.
The problem for me is that I fall out of those 99% of people: I’m a turbo-nerd with a penchant for plugging things in and taking them apart. For me, a lot of the fun of a new PC (foreshadowing) is getting to put the expensive building blocks together and making them look pretty. The other half of the fun is getting to look at the pretty thing you just built and admiring that you didn’t mess up at any of the infinitely easy steps and wipe out a bunch of your cash (except for when you do – that sucks).
Additionally, it’s no secret that consumers’ rights to ownership and privacy have massively eroded, and as someone who studies cybersecurity, I have a lot of problems handing over any of my precious advertising data to services that have 50+ terms of service and sell my information to the highest bidders, who rarely have my best interest in mind. On top of that, now that the subscription licensing model has taken off in practically every software industry, nobody owns the things they pay for anymore, and I think that idea shouldn’t sit well with any consumer worth their salt.
Alas, despite all of these concerns, I still need to do things – my solution is to bring the cloud to me and host stuff myself.
Furthermore, I’ve just always wanted to start a homelab, because the bug that makes people stare for hours at broken config files in black terminals and obsess over how gorgeous a well-organized server rack’s wiring looks bit me at a very young age. A homelab also meant finally being able to run fun experiments where I can run enough VMs to simulate entire networks and play around configurations with my own time (while not risking destroying large quantities of hardware and data).
All of these factors put together culminated in about a year’s worth of research into what solutions were sensible for someone like me. The limiting factor for a long time was price, but thankfully, the summer of 2025 gave me means I didn’t have previously to splurge on a project like this one.
And so, I have struck out against the cloud and begun the process to myself (from as much as I can)! In following posts, I’ll be talking about my decision-making process for why I chose to self-build and use the hardware I did. In the meantime, here’s all the components I went with:
| Component | Model | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 7900 | $329.99 |
| Motherboard | ASUS B650M-PLUS microATX | $129.99 |
| Memory | 2x 2x32GB Crucial Pro DDR5 5600MHz | $134.99 |
| Storage | – 2x HP 1.92TB 2.5″ SATA SSD – WD Blue SN580 500GB M.2 | $259.90 |
| PSU | be quite PURE POWER 12 M 750W | $99.99 |
| Case | Cooler Master MasterBox NR400 | $72.75 |
| CPU Fan | be quiet! Pure Rock Slim 2 | $32.99 |
| GPU | TBD | n/a |
While I’ve built and helped build countless PCs, you learn something new every time. The main thing I learned during the ~4 hour build process of The Beast was that almost nobody with sense builds PCs with 4 sticks of DDR5, and for good reason: a great, great many crashes and instability issues. For me, that materialized as the computer throwing a memory error every time I booted. A frustrating amount of troubleshooting and carefully re-inserting/swapping sticks across slots later, I figured out the unintuitive combination of BIOS memory settings allowed my computer to boot and run Proxmox without any stability issues. After its completion, I elected to name the server “The Beast”, as sans a GPU, this is the most powerful computer I’ve built for anyone to-date.
I built this back in early June of 2025, and if you’re reading this site, that means it’s probably still working swimmingly. I’ll talk at length about my experiences with Proxmox and the things I’m hosting on top of it, but as of writing, most of my experiences with The Beast have been very positive.
Thanks for reading up to this point, and stay tuned for more posts regarding how I’m using The Beast! Have a phenomenal day!