From a Homelab to PrivoHub

PrivoHub started at home, in a homelab.

Like a lot of people who care about their data, we ran our own services rather than hand our photos, files and passwords to platforms that treat them as fuel for advertising. Photos, Drive and Vault, the same three apps we offer today, first ran on hardware we owned, in a rack at home, for an audience of one.

It worked. But it also taught us exactly why most people never get to have this.

The private ideal has a hidden cost

Running the application is the easy part. Anyone with a spare machine can spin up a photo server in an afternoon. The hard part, the part that separates a hobby project from something you'd trust with the only copy of your child's first steps, is everything around it.

Real durability isn't a single disk in a single box. It's redundant disks so one failure doesn't lose your library. It's a second node so a dead motherboard doesn't take you offline for a week. It's replication so your data exists in more than one place at all times, off-site backups so a house fire or a stolen machine isn't the end of the story, plus monitoring, security updates, and certificates that quietly renew themselves. None of it is visible when things are working. All of it is the reason things keep working.

The economics don't work for one home

Here's the problem. To protect a fairly modest amount of personal media properly, a single household has to buy and power hardware that is deliberately over-provisioned and redundant (extra drives, a second node, a way to hold backups somewhere else) and then watch most of it sit idle. Add the physical space, the noise, the electricity, and the hours of your own time spent maintaining it, and the cost of doing it right is wildly out of proportion to the data you're actually protecting.

So people don't do it right. They run a single drive with no real backup and hope. Or they give up and upload everything to a large platform after all, trading their privacy for someone else's redundancy.

The costs are shareable

The key realisation was this: almost all of those expensive parts are fixed, and they don't need to be duplicated for every person. Redundant hardware, replication, off-site backups, monitoring, the operational know-how to keep it healthy: one properly-built platform can carry many households at once. The durability doesn't get cheaper because you're one person; it gets cheaper because you share it.

So we built PrivoHub

PrivoHub is that shared platform. We run one professionally-operated system, highly available, replicated across machines, backed up and monitored, and we divide its cost across everyone who uses it. You get the resilience of a serious data centre for a fraction of what it would cost to build and run alone.

Sharing the hardware never means sharing your data. Every tenant is kept strictly separate: your own storage, your own database, your own instances of each app, behind your own login. The infrastructure is pooled; your photos, files and passwords are not.

The homelab dream, without the homelab

That's what PrivoHub is really for. All the ownership and privacy of self-hosting, with open-source software, your data in the EU and nobody mining it, without buying a single drive, finding space for a rack, or ever waking up to a failed backup.

The homelab was never really about the hardware. It was about keeping what's yours, yours. PrivoHub just makes that something anyone can afford.