About
History
After Dark Enterprise, engineered by sysadminafterdark and monitored by mandolinsara, was founded during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic on November 27, 2020.
My homelab was originally setup as a simple break, fix, burn down, repeat testing playground used to hone my skills as a systems administrator. This later evolved into a “home production” environment used for Plex and not much else.
Mandolinsara joined the team as a NOC administrator in March 2023. She ultimately encouraged me to modernize my homelab and begin the journey to a solid production system. She has been an invaluable asset to keeping me sane and monitoring things while I’m away at my day job.
I quickly realized corporate interests and venture capitalists were encroaching on all of the things that make the internet a cool place and taking advantage of people by offering less product and innovation for more profit.
Disgruntled, I concluded the only way to have true freedom and data autonomy is to self-host my own infrastructure on-premises by utilizing open-source software. This also gives me the opportunity to teach others how to fight big corporations and provide digital sovereignty and technological freedom.
Our Team
Since 2020, our small team is a group of driven, detail-oriented people who are passionate about self-hosting, systems administration, security and delivering the best informative content and merchandise to our customers. Enshitification free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do you self-host everything? Isn’t there risks?
There are risks to EVERYTHING you do online, even if you pay someone for managed services. I prefer to have autonomy over my data and the security I place in front of it. I can point to where my data is and how it is being handled. Can you?
What is your end goal?
My end goal is to ultimately have all of my data on-premise and to teach others how to run their own sovereign cloud. Once I get more space, I’d like to add more equipment racks and eventually expand out to a colocated disaster recovery site in a data center.
What’s in the rack?
As of 2025, we are a Dell and MikroTik shop. We utilize pfSense, Proxmox, TrueNAS, Ubuntu Server, and Rocky Enterprise Linux to host around 50 virtual machines that make up our environment. If you’d like to learn more, please be sure to check out our “Year In Review” articles on our blog.
Why did you go open-source?
Because we were burned by the Broadcom acquisition and we have stickers to tell the tale! I’m frankly unimpressed by cloud based solutions and proprietary vendors that sit on their hands and do nothing to protect their customers’ data while squeezing them for every penny they can.
Where can I find your policies?
You can find our Privacy Policy and Return Policy by clicking the links provided here.
How can I contact you?
The best way to get in contact with us is by joining our Discord server. If you have a more private question, such as lost or damaged orders, reporting a bug or security issue, or anything else, you can contact me via email.