Most “smart homes” today aren’t actually smart.
They’re cloud-dependent, subscription-driven, and locked into a single vendor ecosystem. If the internet goes down, half your house stops working. If the company changes its pricing or kills a product line, you’re stuck replacing devices.
That’s not automation. That’s renting control of your own house.
This is where Home Assistant changes everything.
For years, UniFi Protect has been one of the most popular surveillance systems for home lab enthusiasts and small businesses.
It looks great.
The interface is polished.
And the integration with UniFi networking gear is seamless.
But over the past few years, a noticeable shift has started happening in the home lab and self-hosted communities.
In Part 2 of this series, we’re setting up Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) inside Proxmox so we can start exposing our local services with clean HTTPS URLs and valid SSL certificates.
This is where the home lab starts feeling real.
Instead of accessing Home Assistant with something like:
http://192.168.1.20:8123…we’ll be able to use:
https://ha.domain.comAnd because we’re using Cloudflare DNS validation, we can issue a wildcard certificate for our domain and keep everything secure and polished.