There are so many options to get started with self hosting that I feel myself stuck in the “paralysis of choice”. For a novice, does anyone have a good resource for the equivalent of good/better/best paths that cover the “basics” (In my mind this is hosting images, music, video, connected home controls, search and email)?
Thinking something like first try path A, if you feel comfortable and your HW can handle A, then try path B, etc. I guess a it of a tutorial mode feeling where you get exposed to key boxing blocks initially and then you are released into the large open world on your own.
I know the advantage of this movement is the choice and the well distributed variety, but just feels hard to start.
I have an old laptop, an SFF workstation and a NAS to play with.
Any suggestions?
Edit: Thank you all for a very generous response. I knew this was a tough ask from the start because, by design, this area is vast and constantly evolving. A lot of great starting points here that I’m now considering.
Well if you want the real basics of self-hosting then depending on your level of knowledge you may want to follow a Linux tutorial like this one: https://labex.io/linuxjourney
This will teach a lot of basic knowledge and terminology you may need when setting up or maintaining containers and VMs. Admittedly, this is somewhat tangential knowledge to your immediate goals, but if you want to actually use your self-hosted stuff remotely later this will become critical to doing so safely.
As for the map, for me it was something like:
Local LXC/QEMU → Remote LXD over SSH on a RPi → Proxmox on a dedicated box through the webinterface
In hindsight I would have started with Proxmox directly though I guess. One big downside is it doesn’t integrate well with Docker containers, you have to set up a full VM as your Docker host. On the upside though you can install LXC containers from https://www.turnkeylinux.org/ in a few clicks, so it’s very good for just testing stuff out and playing around.