About NodeShelf and how we compare things
NodeShelf compares hardware and services for home labs and self-hosted setups — mini PCs, NAS boxes, networking gear, and the backup and remote-access services that sit alongside them.
How we compare things
Every comparison on this site is built from four kinds of material:
- Published specifications from the manufacturer’s own documentation and product pages.
- Vendor pricing pages for software, captured with the date we checked them.
- Aggregated public reviews — patterns across many user reports, not any single opinion.
- Our own tabulation of that data into comparison tables and decision matrices.
That last one is the part we add. Individually, a spec sheet tells you a mini PC has 2.5GbE. It does not tell you which mini PCs with 2.5GbE also have a RAM ceiling high enough for the workload you have in mind, at a price you would accept. Putting those together into a table you can read in one pass is the work.
What we do not do
We do not test hardware. We do not buy review units, run benchmarks, or measure power draw ourselves. If you see a claim on this site that reads like first-hand experience, it is a mistake — please tell us and we will correct it.
This matters because a lot of “reviews” online describe testing that never happened. We would rather be plainly useful about what the specs say than pretend to an authority we have not earned.
If that changes — if we ever do buy and test something — the article will say so explicitly, and the distinction will be obvious.
Who writes this
NodeShelf is written by Mark Ellery.
That is a pen name. It is not the author’s legal name, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. A site that insists on not overstating what it has tested should not quietly overstate who is writing.
What is real is the background. The author is a systems engineer at a manufacturing company with more than seven years building internal tools and running small-scale infrastructure — the kind of work where you size a machine against a workload, argue about network throughput, and live with the result. That experience is what the comparisons here are built on.
There is no photo, and there will not be one.
How we make money
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy hardware or sign up for a service through them, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Commissions never determine what we recommend or how products are ranked. The ordering in our tables comes from the comparison criteria stated in each article. Where a product without an affiliate program is the better answer, we say so.
Full details are on the affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
Specifications change, prices change, and we get things wrong. If you spot an error, send us a note. Corrections are made in the article itself, and the updated date at the top reflects when it last changed.