ECC RAM is overkill for a home lab.

Probably not. Random crashes from memory errors are vanishingly rare with modern DDR4/DDR5, even without ECC.

The bigger issue is that ECC won’t fix the common causes of crashes in Proxmox: bad power supplies, dodgy drives, overheating, or driver bugs. Most “random crashes” in a home lab are power or cooling problems, not bit flips.

ECC is expensive, requires specific CPUs and motherboards (typically server-grade), and gives you maybe 0.1% more uptime in practice. If you’re running production databases or ZFS with critical data, sure, consider it. But for a handful of VMs learning Kubernetes or hosting Plex? Save the money.

Don’t buy ECC as a crash-prevention device. Buy it if you need absolute data integrity for important work. For a home lab, invest in a good UPS and reliable storage instead.