Selfhosted

Did that as well a while ago and generally it's working pretty good, some services had the possibility to migrate existing accounts to authentik even. But even though it's been pretty reliable so far I'm hesitant to migrate my more critical services behind another runtime dependency.

Cool! Home Assistant has it and I can imagine Nextcloud as well but those are overkill just for that.

You can start by using any old PC you have laying around and install Proxmox on it. Proxmox is a free hypervisor that allows you to make virtual machines and containers which makes it easy to setup and administrate servers/services. This will give you a good foundation to start playing around and give you an idea of your resource requirements.

Pick something you want to self host first. Do you want a media library? Then look into Jellyfin guides, or komga, or whatever. Do you want a centralized blocking dns server for all your devices? Look into adguard/pihole/etc. do you want to fuck around with llms? That’s a whole thing but you totally can and look into guides on doing it

Just as advice you’ll find people that become borderline evangelical on what you use. It doesn’t really matter. Debian vs unraid vs truenas, ecc ram or not, etc. I mean it does, somewhat, and you should read about it, but don’t get hung up on small details. For home use basically anything is fine. Get an old ewaste pc from 2012 and run whatever os you want (just not windows though)

Don't have a good guide, but in addition on the thing you plan to selfhost yourself you need to decide where it's supposed to run. In a rented VM from a hoster? There are several ones where you can get a decent VM for a few bucks each month.

Nowadays, Docker (or containers in general) are very popular, as an alternative to directly installing services on the vm. They make many things easier, but it's another thing to learn about when you're just starting - fortunately, there's plenty of guides etc!

Find something that interests you, and look at the docs of how to get started. It literally is the easiest way to learn and get involved in self hosting

I know you're half joking. But nevertheless, I'm not missing this opportunity to share a little selfhosting wisdom.

Never use auto update. Always schedule to do it manually.

Virtualize as many services as possible and take a snapshot or backup before updating.

And last, documentation, documentation, documentation!

Happy selfhosting sunday.

Yes

I do love how little maintenance is needed until you have to re-learn everything you forgot