New to home servers?
A home server is a small always-on computer in your house whose job is to hold your data and run the things you’d otherwise rent from a cloud service: file storage, a media library, a photo backup, a few apps, and any extra machines you need for a project.
Instead of a folder of photos stuck on one laptop, a pile of external drives you plug in one at a time, and a handful of subscriptions, a home server keeps everything in one place that your phone, TV, and computers can all reach over Wi-Fi or ethernet.
Why people run one
Section titled “Why people run one”The first reason is ownership: your files and apps live on hardware you own, not on a cloud subscription that can change its price or terms. The second is safety. A home server can combine several disks so that if one fails, your data is still safe and you just swap the bad drive.
It also puts everything in one place. Photos, movies, documents, and backups sit in a single library the whole house can use. And because it’s a real computer, it can host a media streamer, a password manager, or a Linux machine for tinkering as your own private services.
The terms you’ll meet
Section titled “The terms you’ll meet”These are the words you’ll see in Bitsmith.
Drive. A physical disk in or attached to the server: SATA, NVMe, or USB.
Storage space. One or more drives combined into a single place to keep files, with a layout that decides how much protection you get. A mirror survives one drive failing; RAIDZ layouts survive one or two. Underneath, a storage space is a ZFS pool.
Share. A folder on a storage space that other devices on your network can open, with a login per person and read-only or read-write access. Shares use SMB, which every phone, TV, and computer already speaks.
App. A self-hosted service such as Jellyfin, Nextcloud, or Home Assistant, installed from a built-in library. Apps run as regular Docker containers, and the folders they use live on your storage spaces.
Virtual machine (VM). A whole computer running inside your server, with its own operating system. You’d use one for anything that needs its own Linux or a full machine to itself. VMs run on KVM.
Container (LXC). A lighter alternative to a VM: an isolated Linux box that shares the server’s kernel, boots in about a second, and uses far less memory. Good for a small service or a place to experiment.
Backup. A scheduled copy of files, apps, VMs, or containers to a second drive, a USB disk, or another machine, kept so you can restore from an earlier point in time.
Peer. Another Bitsmith server on your network, paired with this one so they appear as one cluster.
How this is usually set up
Section titled “How this is usually set up”Running a home server has traditionally meant learning a stack of separate technologies: a filesystem like ZFS to pool drives and protect against failure, Samba to expose network shares, Docker to run apps, KVM and LXC for machines, and a pile of config files to wire it together. That’s powerful, and it’s also the reason a home server has a reputation for being a hobby in itself.
Where Bitsmith fits
Section titled “Where Bitsmith fits”Bitsmith does the wiring for you. Point it at your drives and it sets up the storage, the shares, the apps, the virtual machines, and the backups through a web interface, using ZFS, Samba, Docker, KVM, and LXC underneath without asking you to configure them by hand.
Next: Install Bitsmith.