Building a home lab in Malaysia — hardware costs and what to actually get

by Huzaifah Malik·May 20, 2026

Built mine over 8 months as budget allowed. Here's what I have and what it cost in Malaysia.

The core: RM800
Used Dell OptiPlex SFF (i7-6700, 16GB RAM) from Lowyat or Shopee. These corporate surplus machines are excellent value. Runs Proxmox for virtualisation.

Storage: RM350
2x 2TB WD Red HDDs in a simple ZFS mirror. Not fast, but reliable and redundant.

Networking: RM280
TP-Link managed switch + a used Mikrotik router from a computer fair.

Power: RM180
APC UPS for clean shutdown during Tenaga outages.

Total: ~RM1,610

What I run: Home DNS (Pi-hole), self-hosted Bitwarden, media server, and a Kubernetes learning cluster.

Is it worth it? For learning: absolutely. For anything production-critical: use the cloud. The hands-on experience with networking, storage, and virtualisation is hard to replicate in a purely cloud environment.

#homelab#hardwarE#Proxmox#Malaysia#learning

Comments (6)

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