Homelabbing in basic terms is just hosting most services and files yourself rather than using online services like the cloud and web-providers, homelabbing is becoming more and more popular lately with the rise in concern for digital privacy and the interest of using/learning about old tech that is still able to be used rather than thrown away, either being recycled or become e-waste.
The costs of homelabbing has probably been the most expensive things that I have made purchases for this year, including storage, computer parts, cables, and adapters, just so that I can run whatever services and host whatever files that I want, making it a really convenient and useful tool but one that is also really hard to turn away paying for, as usually you will find prices and deals that are just TOO GOOD to pass up and would improve your homelab JUST ENOUGH to where you want it to be, but then you figure that you want your homelab to be a bit better again and the cycle repeats.
I have spend many nights where I would stay up until ~2 am working on my homelab trying to get a certain systemd service working, or getting a docker container running the correct way. The really convenient things about NOT homelabbing is that you basically just have to give money to the online service provider and then it's pretty hands off, with you not ever having to spend time trying to debug and work with weird FOSS systems that people wanted to produce, in which they thought that their method was the most intuitive.
If you ever have the issue of a drive failing for unknown reasons, electrical surges reseting you machine, or even having to RTFM, you will understand just how annoying it is to try and get a stable and simple server working. Now granted, I am using a broken laptop for my server and have had to change multiple config files and get protective hardware just to make sure that my server has 2-9s of uptime but before going through all the effort of "debugging" and finding issues, I've had my server go down almost weekly, with me having to manually hook it up to a monitor and external keyboard/mouse just to fix the issue. Sometimes with the BIOS bugging out from the CMOS battery dying (or power surges), to just having to write 4 different systemd service files and custom scripts just to make sure that if my webserver breaks or one of my drives disconnects prematurely that I would still be able to work on my machine through ssh. I haven't had to touch my machine for weeks now and I must say it is so nice just to be able to run simple commands on my phone that I quickly type up and can just run, with more complicated commands usually just needing to be done on my laptop. If you do homelabbing, it is highly recommended that you take notes on the different issues that you face, in case that you come across them again, it will say you so much searching, and you can write it in a way that you understand, making it so you don't have to understand some linux jargon off of stack overflow that you've never heard of.
Homelabbing is worth it