Do you have any advice or suggestions about it?
- Hardware (what should be enough for a local PC, or VPS…)
- Software (OS [Debian, Yunohost, other…], “containerization” (Docker, virtual machines?), dashboard, management, backups, VPN tunneling…)
- “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]…)
I’m aware it’s a lot of stuff to take on, so, do you have any advice on where to start? (how to find a cheap PC to experiment with, if not get a VPS, what to test on it, what “utilities” to try self-hosting first…)
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.