If you have systems or services you’re dependant so strongly, always have an backup / emergency access. 3rd party or self hosted.

My 5c but I think you agree.

Point being as a decades old it professional I see design more important as the detail implementation.

You seem to imply you also want to selfhost some email service. But that’s sadly one of the few things that will always be better at a trusted third party email provider.

Besides that it seems the most important thing you want is pure data storage, and that kind of selfhosting is not hard. In many cases one would not even consider it as part of “selfhosting” as it can be as simple as a local NAS or external HDD.

So my question is what do you actually want to accomplish? Because I think for a lot of your concerns you don’t even need to go and host something.

Instead of self hosting, why not try better offerings?

Most anything you probably use Google for, you can do with a disroot account. Riseup is a great group, with many similar services (not all). The tildeverse also has myriad replacement services.

Just try to support them, financially.

If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it’s the perfect home server for beginners.

• It’s cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
• If it’s old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
• it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
• It’s slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it

Most services don’t need much. So it’s just fine if your “server” is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.

@MTZ saving this for later! I aim to go the same path soon :)

since you’re so new to self hosting, don’t open anything up to the internet. You’re in for a world of pain if you do.

Write things down

You will break something - and that’s good, it’s the best way to learn - but you’ll want to make a note of what you did / went wrong / how you fixed it.

Future you will still break things and be grateful that you wrote that thing down

You’ll buy something and find next year it was the wrong thing (too small, too large, too old, too new), so just get second hand stuff until you know what you need.

Cabled networks are so much better than wireless, but then you’ll need switches and cables and shelves and stuff… so using today’s wifi is fine, but know where you’re heading.

You need to store you stuff - that’ll be in a NAS

You need something to run services on - that’ll be your server

These might be the same physical metal lump (your 2nd laptop?), they might be separate… play around, break something and work out what feels right for you… and then put your data on there

… and that’ll break too.

Just be aware… if sync files between devices. That’s not a backup. (Consider you’ve deleted / corrupted something - it’s now replicated everywhere)

Having a NAS with 10 drives in a RAID6 array, is not a backup. It’s just really robust against a drive failure, but a deleted file is still a deleted file.

Take a full copy of your data off your system - then restore it somewhere else.

Did it work? If so, that’s a backup.

At first, you have to decide what do you need. You can selfhost almost everything, but in my opinion there is no need to do so.

Second thing is hardware to host it. I saw a few comments recommending NAS. It is of course good thing, but my suggestion is just building your own NAS. You need only decent computer to do it.

The easiest way is just installing TrueNAS on it - with that you can setup file sharing and your apps via docker.

But what apps would you need/want? I can recommend a few from my stack:

• vaultwarden - for storing passwords, 2FA codes
• immich - for storing photos, videos, autoupload from phone
• adguard - for getting rid of ads, tracking They are really easy to deploy.

As an alternative to file shares via SMB, nextcloud is really good option. It’s google drive on steroids. Also includes photo gallery with great app on android/ios with autoupload option.

The FUTO guide is meant for total beginners.

Use DietPi, it’s a great OS

I’d recommend starting by hosting a nextcloud instance.

1. Get a desktop computer, pretty much anything will do but having room to add more HDD is important.
2. Install Linux distro like Ubuntu or something
3. Get a static IP so your IP doesn’t change
4. Setup a router port forwarding rule so that an outside address points to your nextcloud instance.

Then do some optional steps:

• Automatically turn on PC when power comes back on (BIOS setting)
• Startup script that runs nextcloud on startup
• Install docker to manage services like nextcloud
• Add some remote desktop thingy to manage your server from your laptop (ssh is also good but a steeper learning curve)
• Get a NAS for storing data with redundancy.
• Have some other form of backup like your current Google account, cloud provider or one of your mates with a similar setup.

That’s pretty much what you need to start hosting your own files, then later on you can setup a email server, media server like Jellyfin, homepage and everything.

Just go one step at a time and when you hit an issue you can and should ask Google or ChatGPT. Remember, everything exposed to the Internet is vulnerable so take security seriously. Always have everything protected by a decently long password, pairing requirement with your server confirming adding a device or an API key.

Start with a nas, the rest will naturally come when you try to access your data for outside, or organize your data, or save more data types to your nas.

Your nas should be the central device and you build the rest around it.

Now, The question is, which nas? I would recommend synology, they are not too performance, a bit expensive and the company is lately doing suspicious moves, but the sw and the hw are rock solid and they are quite good for beginners from almost all angles. Extra point for how many howtos and tutorials are present in internet.

Once you are comfortable with them, you will realize the rest

if it seems daunting, which it is!, maybe it would be a good piont to ask yourself if you really need to run a server and these self hosted web apps in the first place. i did for about 10 years but i realised at some point i didnt need half of it.

if youre planning on having multiple users or want to share one of the services (like real time editing of files or passwords etc) then thats where self hosted stuff makes sense to me, but if not then syncthing can do a lot without needing any complicated setup

keepass is a good example. or note taking apps like jopin or obsidian where the data is store in plain text and where you can choose where the data is stored works great with syncthing

for about a year before i did any self hosted stuff i was running only syncthing on my laptop and phone without any server so its do-able and you can get started right now and worry about getting a server later.

tailscale is a huge help as well and is very easy to setup. say you repurpose an old laptop as a server for now and install whatever services on it, jellyfin for example, you will only be able to access that when you are on your home network but not when you are away, and thats where tailscale comes in. as long as its installed on each device you should be able to connect to your apps/services from anywhere.

basically you can start small and then over the coming months and years as you learn more you will get more confident about moving onto more complicated setups

A single misconfigured thing can suck real bad as you’ve seen.
Selfhosting involves lots of things that can be misconfigured or go bad.

That’s not to scare you out of it out anything, merely to congratulate you in seeking knowledge first.

Disclaimer: I’m biased towards networks because I’m a network engineer, opinions may differ.

I would say… having at least a vague grasp of layers 1-4 of the traditional network model is a decent start.
You don’t need to understand everything, but knowing a minimum will help a lot imho.

It’s hard to point you in the right direction without knowing what you already know or not.

I wanna say thank you for making this post OP. I’ve got a spare laptop that I want to try to turn into my own cloud server but I find the endeavour similarly hard as well. I’ll be looking at the tips in the comments. Good luck OP!