Selfhosted

1. Control and privacy. The server does exactly what I choose, not somebody's business model.
2. Once you have other users, it's not a hobby anymore. People are not amused by downtime.
3. The w3schools.com tutorials have been good for me.

1. Not having to give up my privacy for everything.
2. GUIs are not needed when self-hosting. (I mean when deploying services)
3. Learn Linux and start simple with a Raspberry Pi or laptop. That's how I started.

1. Things like changes to TOS or services can be seriously mitigated by hosting it yourself. WHat happens if Spotify changes the music they host or inserts ads into everything. Well for me, nothing. On the flip side, if some of my stuff goes down, kids and wife will bark. But honestly its mostly set it and forget it.

2. KISS is a thing that applies to many things in life. Anything "smart" in your home should ideally function without your "smart" features working. Ie: light switches should be dumb light switches if something breaks etc etc. Also dont get caught in using rack or enterprise gear. You can learn just as much using smaller, fatter desktops with bigger fans and air cooling over a power hungry rack servers with 80mm fans that blow your eardrums out. My entire lab runs on old dell workstations and raspberry pis'

3. https://www.servethehome.com/ -

Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in /etc/containers/systemd/, daemon-reload and presto, you've got a service that other containers or services can depend on.

NixOS is awesome!

1. Our internet goes out periodically, so having everything local is really nice. I set up DNS on my router, so my TLS certs work fine without hitting the internet.
2. I wish someone would've taught me how to rip blurays. It wasn't a big deal, but everything online made it sound super sketchy flashing firmware onto a Bluray drive.
3. I'm honestly not sure. I'm in CS and am really into Linux, so I honestly don't know what would be helpful. I guess start small and get one thing working at a time. There's a ton of resources online for all kinds of skill levels, and as long as you do one thing at a time, you should eventually see success.

For #2 and #3, it’s probably exceedingly obvious, but wish I would have truly understood ssh, remote VS Code, and enough git to put my configs on a git server.

So much easier to manage things now that I’m not trying to edit docker compose files with nano and hoping and praying I find the issue when I mess something up.

That sex isn't love.

For me #2 would be "you have ADHD and won't be able to be medicated so just don't"

I've mentioned elsewhere my server upgrade project took longer than expected.

Just last night I threw it all into the trash because I just can't anymore

Benefits:

• Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for ~~piracy~~ storing all my legally obtained files.

• Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.

• Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.

• Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.

As for things I wish I knew... Don't use windows for servers. Just don't.

SMB sucks, try NFS.

Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.

Bold of you to assume I'm a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started... Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.