Ask Lemmy

Some useful self-hosting advice:

• Unless you work in IT, you can always start easy. Multiple brands offer solutions that are already configured, receive updates, and are properly managed. For example, ZimaBoard comes by default with CasaOS, a very user-friendly interface to cover all of your basic self-hosting needs.
• You can also install CasaOS, Yunohost and other simple self-hosting solutions on any device, and it's not too complicated even if you never did anything of the kind before.
• If you mainly want to replace cloud storage, there's a multitude of brilliant commercial NAS offerings by Synology, QNAP, ASUStor and others. The devices do all the complicated parts all by themselves, and even talk to your router to properly set the networking. They commonly come with all sorts of mobile apps and suites allowing you to easily manage everything on the go. They can even be used to self-host anything, just like a normal server!
• As your home server is most likely to be based on Linux (most certainly Debian and its derivative, Ubuntu), knowing Debian/Ubuntu and Linux in general will help to ease its setup and maintenance.
• If you have somewhat powerful hardware and want to host many things at once, Proxmox is a godsend. It has a fully functional GUI to manage everything (just don't be scared of many buttons and interface elements, you'll only need like 3 of them at first), it can manage resources very efficiently, reducing the server load, and it makes containerization and virtualization a breeze, so you don't have to think much about it.