Most tech companies or larger IT departments have a space dedicated to testing, evaluating, or developing gear. The industry term for this is a "lab." People who collect gear and do IT at home as a hobby refer to their lab has a "home lab".
Not trolling, I had no idea. Obviously I got it was basically a home server setup but I couldn't see where the term came from.
If it helps you feel any better, I've never heard of it before either
I don't know where it comes from, but the distinction's basically 'when a home server becomes home servers', or at least becomes a hobby, as opposed to just setting up and forgetting a Pi-hole once or something.
Originally, a "home lab" is specifically for learning and testing, primarily for professional reasons: i.e. someone going for a Cisco networking certification might get a stack of old Cisco routers and build test environments with them, someone learning windows networks might setup a windows domain on multiple PCs, ...
It's kind of morphed and people fold their home "production" environments into the term too.
It's in the above link:
Homelab [hom-læb](n): a laboratory of (usually slightly outdated) awesome in the domicile
Well, sure, but IME 'production' at home is essentially the same as lab tinkering. How many home labbers have even one home environment besides 'production'?
I meant "production" in the sense of "things you run to use, not just to learn". I.e. on /r/homelab you get many people with "I have a bunch of Ubiquiti gear, a NAS and a server running Plex", which isn't that "experimental", even if they did learn something while setting it up. Whereas the mentioned pile of Cisco routers might never see traffic that's not part of testing something. And of course the two can mix.