Engineering, pricing, and field reports from building HostAnywhere.
Which hardware to use (gaming PC, Mac, mini PC, Raspberry Pi), how much RAM you need for local LLMs, storage and power costs, and a step-by-step setup — with real machines and screenshots.
Turn a computer you own into a private AI server — install open models in one click, add a browser chat UI, reach it from anywhere — plus an honest look at where a local AI server beats cloud LLM providers, and where it doesn't.
How AI spend limits work in an AI gateway: dollar budgets per hour, day, week, or month, sliding vs fixed windows, scoping to providers and models, stacking rules, how cost is counted (local models are $0), what your code sees at the cap (HTTP 429), fail-open behaviour, and the five budgets most deployments need.
What AI guardrails are and how they work in an AI gateway: content safety across 13 categories, prompt-injection detection, PII redaction, and custom blocklists — off/flag/block/redact, the default policy, fail-open vs fail-closed, per-route scoping, what your code sees on a block, and common mistakes.
How LLM routing works in an AI gateway: routes, failover chains, and conditional rules that pick a model per request by prompt size, image content, tenant tier, or environment — with copy-paste JSON, the code to call it, and how to prove a rule fired.
A complete guide to the HostAnywhere AI Gateway — the LLM, MCP, and A2A gateways, plus providers, routes, caching, API keys, MCP servers, A2A agents, guardrails, spend limits, and observability.
A contractor needed SSH access to a NAS in my basement for a two-week project. I gave them narrow, time-bound access without opening router ports, configuring a VPN, or provisioning cloud infrastructure.
An honest retrospective on consolidating iCloud, Tailscale, and Cloudflare Tunnel into HostAnywhere. What stayed, what went, what's still missing six months later.
An honest field report on backing up my iPhone (Photos, Videos, Contacts, Calendars, Health) to a Mac mini in my basement, end-to-end encrypted. What works after six months and what doesn't.
Stop trusting hotel and coffee-shop Wi-Fi. Route your laptop's entire internet through a device you own at home — with automatic failover when home goes down.
A practical walkthrough of identity-bound networking, least-privilege access rules, and optional posture checks for a 5-person engineering team — starting at $9/mo flat.
How HostAnywhere uses CrowdStrike Falcon ZTA scores to gate access — without paying for a full ZTNA suite. Setup, examples, and limits.
Conditional Access gates Microsoft 365 on Intune compliance. What about your self-hosted apps, internal services, and homelab? Here's how to wire that up.
Per-seat SaaS pricing punishes growth and rewards keeping team size artificially small. Here's why HostAnywhere charges flat-fee per network, and what we gave up to do it.
We picked WireGuard for the HostAnywhere mesh instead of building our own protocol. Here's what we gained and what we honestly gave up.