Please bear with me as I don’t know where else to ask.
I want to start to self host but do not know where to start. I would like to start small. Just something that might not be beneficial but to get my feet wet. It does not even have to be practical.
I am not tech illiterate and have my fair share of technology around me hut self hosting has always been a daunting task.
I am scared to start.
I am already using a PiHole at home but that was kind of plug and play and just worked.
I would be incredibly grateful if someone could guide me to some resource or tell me what an easy first step would be.
An FAQ or self hosting for dummies.
Most resources I found assumed some previous knowledge.
That takes away a lot of stress. Knowing to just get started and ignore the best approach instead of just a getting started approach and learn as you go.
For the longest time I wanted to get rid if my google drive or google calendar and host one myself.
Email as I have read is something more advanced but I would like to self host my email as well.
Photos eventually too.
As a lot of people have recommended nextcloud that seems like where my interest might be heading.
As a starting point. Are there any hardware recommendations for a toy home server?
Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.
just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.
Whatever you already have. Old desktop, even old laptop (those come with a built-in battery backup!). Failing what, Raspberry Pis are pretty popular and cheap and low power consumption, which makes it great if you’re not sure how much you want to spend.
Otherwise, ideally enough to run everything you need based on rough napkin math. Literally the only requirement is that the stuff you intend to run fits on it. For reference, my primary server which hosts my Lemmy instance (and emails and NextCloud and IRC and Matrix and Minecraft) is an old Xeon processor close to a third gen Intel i7 with 32GB of DDR3 memory, there’s 5 virtual machines on it (one of which is the Lemmy one), and it feels perfectly sufficient for my needs. I could make it work with half of that no problem. My home lab machine is my wife’s old Dell OptiPlex.
Speaking of virtual machines, you can test the waters on your regular PC by just loading whatever OS you choose in a virtual machine (libvirt if you’re on Linux, VirtualBox or VMware otherwise). Then play with it. When it works makes a snapshot. Continue playing with it, break it, revert to the last good snapshot. A real home server will basically be the same but as a real machine that’s on 24/7. It’s also useful to test things out as a practice run before putting them on your real server machine. It’s also give you a rough idea how much resources it uses, and you can always grow your VM until it fits and then know how much you need for the real thing.
Don’t worry too much about getting it right (except the backups, get those right, verify and test those regularly). You will get it wrong and eventually tear it down and rebuild it better what what you learn (or want to learn). Once you gain more experience it’ll start looking more and more like a real server setup, out of your own desire and needs.