Home Assistant master/slave vs. a central platform: which fits when?
Home Assistant master/slave merges nodes into one home; a central platform keeps client houses apart. Which route fits when, with a clear decision guide.
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Posts on Architecture
Collected posts on Architecture — from our practice running fleets of Home Assistant instances.
Explainer · Tech
Practice · Guide
Make Home Assistant more reliable: get the switching logic out of the server
Make Home Assistant more reliable by wiring basic switching directly between devices: ESPHome on-chip automations, Zigbee binding, Z-Wave. HA stays the brain.
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Practice · Guide
Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN — and without an open port
Home Assistant remote maintenance without VPN: no open port, no full-LAN access. Why both are wrong and what time-boxed, client-granted access looks like.
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Practice · Guide
Home Assistant fleet management: multi-tenant beats the DIY rig
Managing multiple Home Assistant instances for clients with remote_homeassistant, an MQTT bridge or a VPN hits a wall. Why fleet management is its own category.
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Comparison · Practice
A Nabu Casa alternative for integrators? Why that is the wrong question
Homeway, Tailscale, Cloudflare, Nabu Casa compared honestly. And why the real integrator question is not remote access, but oversight.
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Explainer · Tech
CGNAT and Home Assistant: why port forwarding no longer works
Behind Carrier-Grade NAT your public IPv4 is gone and port forwarding silently dies. How to spot CGNAT and still reach Home Assistant.
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Comparison · Guide
Managing multiple Home Assistant instances — 6 approaches compared (2026)
From Nabu Casa Cloud through Tailscale to specialist integrator platforms: an honest comparison of the options, with strengths, limits, and a decision tree at the end.
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Fiction · Story
Thursday, 14:32 — the Z2M cascade nobody was meant to hear
A fictional shift in the life of a solo integrator: three Z2M crashes after a silent add-on update, and the forty minutes between the first symptom and a quiet fix.
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