I’m having trouble finding a proper starting point for self hosting, so I am curious on any resources you’d recommend, or even some build lists / pre-built devices.
What I want to do:
Important
- Host some applications like TinyTinyRSS, Jellyfin, GitLab, and Nextcloud which I’d want to be accessible in my home network
- Use the computer as a NAS to back data up and have it easily accessible on my desktop and laptop
- Have a piHole
Optional
- Access my hosted applications from outside of my network
- Use tools like Radarr to automatically download things from torrent lists
- Use it as a seedbox
The reason the last three are optional is because for that I’d have to expose the computer to the outside network, which has a whole bunch of benefits, but also a whole bunch of risks I am likely neither capable of nor comfortable with working around, so unless there’s an easy fix (number 3 might be able to be handled via a VPN?) they’re a problem for future me. For anything further I think I can just go from here once those requirements develop
I have already skimmed through some articles, watched some build guides for both NAS and home servers and honestly I just don’t know what I need, both in information, hardware, and software.
- Should I separate the NAS and Home Server, get a separate device for the piHole, or just have all three in one?
- What hardware would be suitable for this?
- Should I buy something off the shelf like a mini PC (for instance an Intel NUC) or one of these fancy prebuilt NAS devices where you just need to plug in some drives or build my own?
- Would it be smarter to go with a Linux distro as the OS, for instance Debian, or should I use something like Unraid or TrueNAS which from what I can gather make setup more convenient and even handle docker images for you?
I am somewhat comfortable with Linux and the command line and have a budget of about 1000€, but if I can get away with less that would be great, and I can also stretch higher if needed for my requirements. I am also very new to self hosting and my networking knowledge is not non-existent, but limited.
I’m just a bit lost and would love some beginner-oriented resources or direct advice, thank you!
Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.
As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.
Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.