A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Don't buy anything yet! Except the HDD maybe. Use what you already have to tinker with things and try different setups.
A common OS people use is Proxmox, it's free and you can easily create VMs. You'll come across Docker/Containers sooner or later and you can easily test them in a VM.
Play around, figure out what you need and how you want to set it up, and only then get the necessary hardware.
Plus one for ProxMox, I love that software so much. I am a container person though, and put my containers in containers. Containers all the way down until I am put in a container.
It sounds like you’re having trouble containing yourself.
Hahah, yeah re-reading it I can see where you're coming from. I probably should have been clearer on only the first three being ones I want to get going first. Everything else can come later.
Edit: and the penny just dropped you were making a pun... 😅
I've had some fun with portainer managing docker containers before, but Proxmox sounds like it takes it to the next level!
Great advice!
I have decided to go with just the new hdd as you've suggested to get that pc up and going again. I've used portainer to manage docker containers in the past when running it as a game server, but always assumed Proxmox fulfilled the same niche. Now that I understand it better it sounds like a lot of fun to play around with!
You're in for a great time, have fun!
Be prepared to change your mind...
That first install of proxmox / nextcloud / whatever, will be removed and you will setup something else - this is a good thing.
So, you'll probably want to get onsite backups sorted early... even if that's just cloning to an external drive first.
IMHO don't consider a NAS as your server - keep them separate. A cheap ebay PC with a couple of drives is fine.
And, if you're considering home automation you will want a UPS
You will be surprised at how much you can do with very little and very old hardware.
Yeah I have decided to start off by getting that old pc up as a server to handle some of the items, then expand hardware when I hit constraints.
I started my descent into the depths of self hosting with an old phenom II black PC, I bought a bunch of HDDs and put them in a RAID 10 via mdadm and eventually learned my lesson about not using LVM on my Linux for my storage management. Having volume flexibility has helped immensely there.
I can echo some people’s recommendation of portainer though be careful as if you want to get into multi device docker management portainer has some limits on what you can do for free. I upgraded to their pro tier using their free promo for 3 instances, but then had 2 mini pcs dumped on me by my brother in law, which took me to 4 managed nodes which exceeded their latest limit.
I have since switched to dokploy managing my docker swarm, so considering this platform decision early can save some growing pains, dokploy also has built in management for traefik so it is pretty slick though I have been maintaining my own nginx proxy by hand(not even npm, just nginx and a bunch of service config files).
I definitely recommend pi.hole, something like AMP or crafty controller or some such if you want to host game servers on it still, duplicati is a nice web interface for creating timely backups of things, and supports a variety of cloud storage(I currently offsite to a backblaze B2 storage bucket which is AWS S3 compatible).
Blue iris I think is something I saw passed around recently for security cams, all the Arrs are pretty easy to setup once you get one of them setup. My one drive replacement ended up being own cloud, as I fought with nextcloud getting it setup the way I liked so had to pivot.
Link warden is a tool I have used for archiving websites and creating a shareable bookmark collection. Audiobookshelf and Calibre(plus calibre-web) make a decent way to manage audio and ebooks.
If you are sharing this server and its services with others I highly recommend getting some kind of SSO setup, I ultimately picked Authentik for this, it has great integration documentation for most popular services, now my family can access all my services without having 22 different passwords.
Outside of those recommendations I can recommend checking out some sites like selfh.st for some inspiration on the kinds of services you can run and figure out what your needs/desires are and do some A/B testing on some that operate in the same space to see which ones fit your needs better.
I can also say looking at the greeting pinned post in this community is pretty good as well to get some ideas. I posted my most recent list of services in there(though it is now 2-3 services behind since I am addicted and growing).
If your old gaming pc rig has a decent GPU in it you could also consider running Ollama and open-webui and host your own personal agentic AI. I really feel the sky is the limit when it comes to self-hosting.
Edit:added much needed paragraphing to my monolithic post so that they are better services with looser coupling.
Do you research of raspberry pis, they are really great. You do need to be careful though, sdcards die comparatively fast, and you don't want anything important to be on it when it does. Or at least backed up (Borg is cool).
If you can overcome the first kinda large step of setting up a basic install of Proxmox + ZFS pool, you'll love it. You can try shit out and nuke it if you don't like it. Helper Scripts from here are also a great way to try stuff without breaking anything you already have. each container gets its own IP so you don't have to juggle stuff with a reverse proxy (which is a PITA to set up properly) and with TailScale on the host, you can pretty much access everything from anywhere, without exposing it to the wider internet.
Creating a ZFS pool is also rather nice, because you can keep adding new disks to the pool when you're running short. Ideally you'd use some mirroring for security. Backups are also nice with proxmox, as long as you don't give every LXC a giant size quota.
Last thing, DO get an UPS, even if it's a small consumer grade one that lasts 5 minutes. Make sure it has some sort of conectivity (network or USB) and it's linux compatible. I've lost a lot of time rebuilding a 2yo NextCloud install that went all wonky after a blackout.
So in a detailed summary from your points:
Good Luck and Have Fun!
secondhand used mini pc + some refurbished harddrives
host something that you really need and will use