That’s the thing, it’s pretty typical to have both and do both at the same time! You just have some machines more stable so you don’t wipe your photos when you break k8s.

The first few years of self hosting tend to have a lot of experimentation, so the overlap is natural.

I’m hitting my grumpy old man phase of self-hosting where I want my Minecraft server and Jellyfin to to be stable so I don’t have to hear about it from my family. So ironically, my setup is starting to look more like an overkill setup because I want to self host with stability instead of tinkering around to see if I can run a different server distro, etc. My home lab years got me to find a real nice base, but now I just add things to that base and I don’t mess with the formula I have.

IMO the distinction is that if you are doing it for fun (or education) and could afford to lose any service you run for an extended period, you’re home labbing. If you are doing it for cost savings, privacy, anti-capitalist, or control reasons and the services are critical and need to stay up, you’re self-hosting.

tl;dr - experimentation vs utility