Do you have any advice or suggestions about it?
- Hardware (what should be enough for a local PC, or VPS…)
- Software (OS [Debian, Yunohost, other…], “containerization” (Docker, virtual machines?), dashboard, management, backups, VPN tunneling…)
- “Utilities” to host (Lemmy, Peertube, Matrix, Mastodon, Actual Budget, Jellyfin, Forgejo, Invidious/Piped, local Pi-Hole, email, dedicated videogame servers like for Minecraft, SearXNG, personal file storage like Drive, AI [in the future, when I can afford a rig that can run a local model decently]…)
I’m aware it’s a lot of stuff to take on, so, do you have any advice on where to start? (how to find a cheap PC to experiment with, if not get a VPS, what to test on it, what “utilities” to try self-hosting first…)
Every self hoster will say start with something, like… and another will disagree.
My suggestion is look at what you have and think about what you want to do, and go from there.
I personally did not do that, so take what I said with a grain of salt, I saw ads that where super targeted at me and started to get a whole lot annoyed. This annoyance got me to buy a pi zero and started hosting pihole on my network, I did something and the SD card got fried so I got a pi 4 to replace the thing not yet realizing I probably just needed a new SD card. I got grumpy that some ads where getting through so I got another pi 4 to act as a secondary pihole.
I now can say that I have 1 pi zero 2 running wireguard just for DNS, 2 pi 5’s running pihole 1 of them also runs my Jellyfin server and sails the high seas for me while the other one has some other services doing other things. I also have a pi 4 running HAOS, as I try so hard to get out of proprietary systems. I plan on getting another pi 5 to be my firewall and another to act as my blog/email server.
Just know that running an email server is really hard and also requires your ISP to unblock outbound traffic on port 25.