Selfhosted

I hope someone else can pitch in with a more indepth instructions, but two things I wanted to mention:

First, forget about hosting your own email from home. Seriously. Even those who do it professionally don't want to deal with that at home. You'll find people on fediverse who do it but I'm sure plenty will give you this same recommendation/warning. It's a huge hassle and it's so easy to get your domain blocked/ending up on a blacklist and way harder to get out of it.

Second, I can personally recommend https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/ if you are really starting from scratch ( there's a community here: !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev ). This is how I started and set up my own linux server and started self hosting stuff on it. It's really basic and won't teach you everything you need but it's a great start for setting up your own server. You can do everything with a local server at home that you have set up.

Maybe I can start shedding some light off docker.

When you start setting up a server, you end up having to setup many things. You install various programs and their dependencies. Sometimes those dependencies can conflict with each other, or you mess up your system by manually pasting some command you found on stack exchange. Then you need to manually keep all the software you use up-to-date and pray they don't brick your server and force you to start over. And then when you need to update your OS or move to a new machine, you need to repeat this whole dance again.

Docker is like legos. You want to install jellyfin? There's already a docker imagine for that. You just spin it up with some little configure file and you're done. You want to setup a firewall? You want to setup https access? Automatic updates? There are docker images already made for it.

So you keep on setting up those docker containers and they all run in isolation but can communicate with each other. If you break something, you just restart one or all the containers and you always start fresh. Docker keeps nothing in memory, unless you explicitly want it (e.g. Your jellyfin config will presist in external config files).

Want to move to a new machine? You can just copy over the scripts that run the docker containers and those config files. Software updates? Just update the docker container and it handles all dependencies.

Also, Jellyfin all the way. It's open source and free all the way.

If you go for openwrt instead of librecmc the amount of guides and docs will skyrocket.
Compatible hardware for openwrt is found here:
https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=normal
A tip is to sort on the 5.0GHz table so all the devices that support ac and ax (newer wifi standards) are shown first.
They have a lot of good guides here:
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-quick-start/start

Regarding home server you would want to decide on the host operating system first. Examples are proxmox (hypervisor, controlled mainly through a web ui), a standard linux server with kvm/qemu and docker, openmediavault (NAS operating system) or Windows 11 with HyperV (please don't).

First thing after that is to figure out of to make and restore backups of the system. Knowing that you can restore everything to how it was last night makes tinkering a lot less frustrating. Proxmox has builtin backup systems, with linux I like BORG Backup.

Regarding services you will want to read up on dockers and find a docker management system you like. I run portainer, others swear by dockge and yet some prefer the command line.

Regarding video streaming; If you don't a lifetime license for Plex I would go for Jellyfin. Plex free is continuing to lose, not gain, functions as of now.

Immich is popular for photo storage.

Regarding game servers I think https://pterodactyl.io/ is popular to make it simpler but you can probably find a plain docker image to host minecraft. If you wanna mod mc I know Pterodactyl makes it simpler to add mods on the server.

I highly recommend you use Proxmox as the base OS. Proxmox makes it easy to spin up virtual machines, and easy to back up and revert to backups. So you're free to play around and try stupid stuff. If you break something in your VM, just restore a backup.

In addition to virtual machines, Proxmox also does "LXC containers" , which are system level containers. They are basically a very light weight virtual machine, with some caveats like running the same kernel as the host.

Most self-hosting software is released as a docker-image. Docker is application level containers, meaning only the bare minimum to run the application is included. You don't enter a docker container to update packages, instead you pull down a new version of the image from the author.

There are 3 ways to run docker on Proxmox:

• Install docker inside a virtual machine (recommended).
• Install docker inside a LXC Containers (not recommended because of various edge cases)
• Install docker directly on the Proxmox host (not recommended for various reasons).
• (There is ongoing work for running docker images directly in Proxmox, this is in beta/preview since Proxmox 9.1).

The "overhead" of running docker inside a VM on the host is so negligible, you don't need to worry about it.

I feel you have on this post. I often need my tech guides to start 3 steps before earlier. Usually have a few tabs open to refer to; I would also love a self hosting guide that talks to me like I'm a little dumb 😂

What’s the question

I think your best bet is to pick one thing that you can get a good guide for and start from there. If you really want to learn its probably better to start with a Debian or arch setup than proxmox, but that's really going to depend on what you really care about learning.

I know it will be an unpopular opinion but you can use perplexity or Claude to help you find useful sources online if you're striking out on your searching. Most of the time I find they do better with more obscure issues, but those should be rare if you're following a guide

Selfh.st is a great directory and newsletter.