• Anything that you can shove hardware into (CPU, RAM, HDDs, maybe a PCI slot), so any used workstation is a great start, and don’t bother splurging initially, just follow the quality tool rule and only buy when something becomes inadequate. If you want to jump straight into loud and noisy severs, you can pick up used servers for cheap like R730s which there’s a ton of out there. Just avoid 2.5" drive bays because 3.5" HDDS are way cheaper per Gb.

• Would recommend podman over docker as its matured to the point where it has a lot of better features like rootless, quadlets, etc that you might want to take advantage of in the future. OS is whatever linux you prefer, but I recommend you stay away from Ubuntu. If you want something RedHat but not as cutting edge as Fedora, I’ve heard OpenSUSE is pretty nice.

For apps, If you want to do HTTPS via GUI then npmplus is nice option, Otherwise caddy can do the same with text config. Rest is whatever you want to try out :)

EDIT: If you start making an *arr stack, I would recommend recyclarr to handle the quite expansive content filter settings for sonarr and radarr.

Pinhole could be something good to start with, its pretty simple to setup, doesnt depend on other services, doesnt require hefty hardware, and has a meaningful impact.

One of my first self hosting projects was a jellyfin server. Double check, but I think the main hardware requirements are just 4GB of RAM and enough harddrive space for your videos/files!

I really like immich too. It’s like Google photos, but self hosted. It’s super fast for uploading and backing up your photos over your local network. Immich also needs at least 4GB of RAM I think

Copy/paste from another comment I made a while back:

Look into docker containers in general. If I was going to start from scratch in your position this is what I’d do:

Install a Linux distribution on the computer you plan to use for self hosting. This can be anything from a raspberry pi up to a custom build but I would recommend starting with something you have physical possession of. I found Debian with the KDE plasma desktop environment to be pretty familiar coming from Windows. You could technically do most of this on Windows but imo self hosting is pretty much the only thing that a casual user would find better supported through Linux than Windows. The tools are made for people who want to do things themselves and those kinds of people tend to use Linux.

Once you have a Linux distribution installed, get docker set up. Once docker is set up, install portainer as your first docker container. The steps above require some command line work, which may or may not be intimidating for you, but once you have portainer functional you will have a GUI for docker that is easier to use than CLI for most people.

From this point you can find the docker installation instructions for any service you want to run. Docker containers have all the required dependencies of a given service packaged together nicely so deploying new services is super easy once you get the hang of it. You basically just have to define where the container should store it’s data and what web port you want to access the service on. The rest is preconfigured for you by the people who created the container.

There’s certainly more to be said on this topic, some of which you would likely want to look into before you deploy something your whole family will be using (storage setup and backup capability, virtual machines to segregate services, remote accessibility, security, etc). However, the above is really all you need to get to the point where you can deploy pretty much anything you’d like on your local network. The rest is more about best practices and saving yourself headaches when something breaks than it is about functionality.

Depends if you’re hosting something public, or something private.

For public, a webserver is a simple start. Can be anything you want it to be, but as complexity increases, so does the potential amount of attack vectors, so keep that in mind of you’re considering adding things like WordPress and the like.

For private, a NAS and/or a simple game server is a simple and useful start.

As for how, there’s a million ways to do it, and I’m an old stubborn BOFH that still cling to the old ways of doing it (as in, no VMs, no containers), so I’ll defer to others for that.

While purpose built server hardware is always nice since it comes with some useful additions, the truth is that “any” machine will do. Old discarded PC will do just fine.

What are you trying to do?

In the business world, this would be your business requirements. Once you have those then you can spec the technical requirements.

Without having a target, you’ll just be all over the place.

Start with one thing, get that setup, get management for it in place, backup processes, etc.

Then do the next thing.

Iceberg made a great rec - start with Jellyfin. It’s pretty easy, but touches on all sorts of stuff like storage, backups (which media is worth backing up?), etc. Plus it has a high reward - watching what you want, when you want, from almost any device.

Hardware (what should be enough for a local PC, or VPS…)

One of my “servers” I picked up for $15, saving from electronics “recycling”. Unless you’re transcoding video or hosting something with a hefty database that eats ram, whatever you can scrounge is generally good enough.

Software (OS [Debian, Yunohost, other…], “containerization” (Docker, virtual machines?), dashboard, management, backups, VPN tunneling…)

Debian and proxmox is pretty much my host for everything. I run a bunch of containers, usually lxc though a few docker containers here and there.

“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]…)

Jellyfin doesn’t have much in the way of requirements if you’re not transcoding, and if you’ve got a relatively modern iGPU on intel, you’ve got plenty of power to transcode as well. Pi-hole is also pretty lightweight.

In terms of where to find something, I’d start with checking if there are local computer recycling companies, they will resell, and I’ve found they go cheap if you go direct. Otherwise, it depends on where you are. Craigslist occasionally has worthwhile stuff, sometimes ebay, sometimes (and I hate that its become so popular) facebook market. Or maybe just see when a business is getting rid of their off lease stuff and see if you can take something home.

At this point I’m almost exclusively tiny/mini/micro. When one dies (which happened recently), I gut the useful bits and move it somewhere else, or add it to the replacement - which is how my most recent addition, a nuc, has 32gb ram rather than 8gb, and a 500gb m2 rather than a 128gb m2.

Have fun!

Hardware is too wide to tell anything useful out of the blue, depends on what you can get your hands on (as in what’s available locally) and what you actually want to run. Used corporate desktop might be fine, raspberry pi might be good too, mini-pcs are popular and so on. All have their pros and cons.

For the OS proxmox is a solid choise. It has both containers and ‘full’ virtual machines as an option. Debian is good too.

And for the utilities, build something you actually want to use. Pihole is pretty nice. Gaming severs are good to practise with if you’re into that stuff. But if you just build stuff for the sake of it you’ll of course learn on the way but it leaves very little to actually enjoy on what you’ve built.

I really like my immich and nextcloud servers and they’re well worth my time to keep up and running. But with those there’s additional challenge to keep them backed up. Losing pihole server wouldn’t be that bad, it’s easy enough to rebuild, but losing a terabyte of photos is a bit another thing.

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.

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

My first advice is: it’s always too small. You always realize that you need more, as you can get bigger. As an example from me. I started with 3TB of storage for data hoarding. I quickly upgraded to 21TB and it’s still not enough. You may start with something small, but there is so much. Technically you could go up to AI selfhosting. Especially when you go the route with image and video generation, this takes up resources. I heard the Mac Mini is getting used for local AI.

As for what to host, you should ask yourself what do you need. Lemmy and Peertube I count towards not useful for private usage. A cloud storage like Nextcloud is something very useful. Jellyfin is useful. I would start with cutting out 3rd party cloud services from your personal usage. Instead using dropbox/google drive/iCloud and so on, use Nextcloud. Same for images. Make your local media like movies, music, audio books, books and so on accessible to all devices, with the neat features we love from other services like Netflix, Audible, Kindle and so on. You could also just starting hosting your own game servers, than renting or making it only available when you also play.

But be aware of the risks. Something like a Minecraft Server can be made accessible via VPN. If its open to the internet, the damage is rather small, if you don’t value your minecraft world that high. I rather have my Minecraft World deleted, than my personal pictures stolen. When you can open your service only to LAN, you have a lower risk to get it compromised (the risk isn’t zero! It’s never zero. Air gaped systems make it near zero, but not zero.)

When you do open your stuff to the internet, you need to update your software well and configure it well. Stuff like email is a pain to configure. I looked long for a managing software package, which made it easier for me but to leave me freedom. Next important thing is updates. YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR STUFF! I do prefer everything with auto updates. I use watchtower for my docker containers, even though it’s not recommended with some containers. What’s currently a big deal breaker for me is PostgreSQL. I threw out containers and avoided containers requiring it, as it needs manual interaction. For work I actually need to migrate from MariaDB to PostgreSQL for our chat system. At least they do use the LTS version, so you aren’t constantly needing to manually update.

As for the hardware, it highly depends on what do you need. A rented server (a VPS or a dedicated Server) does have the advantage to be easily in the internet and on the same note, this is a disadvantage. For email and websites this is good but you need to be very careful. You can start with a Raspberry Pi. Home Assistant does run on it and they do offer some apps, like AdGuard Home, Bookstack and Vaultwarden. You can also start with a NAS. I run my stuff on my Synology NAS, a DS920+. It has Docker. But you may want to look into a different company, as Synology did some bad stuff, that makes me them not recommending it anymore. I did heard Ugreen should be good. Obviously you could always go bigger and build your own NAS and using truenas or something else. You can also start with a MiniPC and use Proxmox.

For the operating system, I think the best thing is what floats your boat. I do use Ubuntu. Why? Because I like it. Using Containers is a big recommendation from me. With Proxmox you have VMs and LXC containers, which allows you to experiment within a container and separate stuff. You can throw it away easier, without disturbing other stuff, that is working.

I really would recommend to start small and keeping an eye on risk. Start in your local network and with stuff that isn’t big risk. If you stark taking more risks, don’t go full in in the beginning. If for example you hosts your own file cloud or email, don’t abandon your previous provider and start small, with unimportant stuff.

Now to myself: I have running a rented server, a Pi, a Synology NAS and a mini PC.

I did start with a VPS. Very hard and I made quite a few mistakes. the authorities twice called me out for stupid mistakes. It was the fun days, where I actually thought running a Windows Server in the Internet was a smart idea. I did run a webserver and email from them for quite some time. I even had a Skype Music Bot running without issues. What the authorities didn’t like where my attempts with the DNS Server and my MSSQL Server. Now my rented server is running my mail and webserver (with Nextcloud) and if I feel fancy, a game server. I don’t utilize it as I could and in the near future, I do want to switch things up but I need to keep my mail running.

My Synology NAS is the big stuff. It has my data on it and runs most my docker stuff. There I run audiobookshelf, calibre-web, gitea, jellyfin and paperless-ngx for my main stuff.

My Raspberry Pi 5 is running HomeAssistant to control my smart home stuff and a new addition is Music Assistant.

My mini PC is running Proxmox with Frigate. Frigate is a NVR for your cctv. Not that I have a big cctv system.

Technically I did start earlier with a Minecraft Server and a Teamspeak server, running from my own PC but that has the big downside, that you need to keep your PC running.

Hardware: what you currently have on hand to play around with.

Software: start with something simple and well documented. Not quite the driver for the learning phase, in my personal opinion.

“Utilities” as you call them: What is useful to you? What do you want to play with or need to improve your personal use case?

I don’t mean to be flippant with my answers here. Do a little introspection and determine what is genuinely useful for you to self host. I personally run Technitium, Jellyfin, a portion of the "-arr"s, Immich, and Navidrome. My family uses all of these services/utilities on a daily basis, so they are useful for me to host. I have some of the services that need CPU and GPU processing power running on my gaming PC and others running on a Lenovo ThinkCenter that I got for free from the IT department at work. They have bins of PCs slated for recycling that work perfectly fine but are “outdated”.

What device did you use to post this question?

Use that device to run a web server.

I would suggest you start to play around with whatever machine you have in hand. Later on you can migrante to a more serious solution. If you want to first play on a VPS, Hertzner’s are like 4€/month

As for utilities, you could start with (in suggested order over my perceived usefulnes/coolnes/difficulty) Immich, videogame server, Jellyfin, Wireguard, Jupyter server (if you code Python), backrest.

When you want to scale up and migrate into a more “serious” setup, it depends on that you want and your budget. Still, I recommend a multi-disk bay PC (NAS), and go for a dedicated Linux distro (I’m using TrueNAS; not perfect, but overall a very good experience).

Everything, self-host everything, even toilet paper. Wait, hold on, don’t self-host email, that’s a fucking pain.