Edwin J. Rice

Senior DevOps engineer · Sunrise, Florida · RSS

Edwin Rice writes about self-hosted open-source web applications from a homelab in Sunrise, Florida. He has been running NextCloud, Vaultwarden, Immich, Mailcow and Plausible variants on small mini-PCs and a Hetzner VPS since 2019. He picks software based on whether his wife will tolerate it failing on a Saturday morning.

Kraft paper envelope on a mechanical keyboard under a warm desk lamp, evening homelab mood

Mailcow vs Mail-in-a-Box in 2026: Choosing a Self-Hosted Mail Stack

Edwin J. Rice / May 10, 2026

Last October a friend who runs a four-person legal consultancy in Boca lost access to his Microsoft 365 admin panel […]

Mechanical keyboard close-up under warm desk lamp, evening homelab tinker mood

Self-Hosting Vaultwarden in 2026: A Production Setup That Actually Backs Up

Edwin J. Rice / May 7, 2026

Last February my brother-in-law called me from a rental car in Atlanta. His laptop had died the previous week, he

Three mini PCs stacked on a wooden shelf with blue ethernet patch cables draped between them

Building a Homelab on $400 in 2026: Mini PCs Beat the Old NUC

Edwin J. Rice / May 4, 2026

Last October my Synology DS918+ started clicking. Not the “this is a busy seek pattern” click. The “this is a