Don’t provide services to others, including your own family, actually especially your own family, until you are quite comfortable with what is going on and what might be causing issues. Focus on helping yourself or keeping whatever other services you were using before just in case.

Trying to fix something at night, with a fuming partner who’s already put up with a difficult to use service, because of your want for privacy even though they don’t care care, whilst saying “it should work, I don’t know what’s wrong”, is not a great place to be 😁.

Overall though, I found it so interesting that I am doing a part time degree in computer science in my 30s, purely to learn more (whilst being forced to do it to timelines and having paid for it).

I have a very comfortable and ‘forget about it’ setup my family are now using. Every now and then I add new services for myself, and if it works out, will give access to others to use, keep it just for me or just delete it and move on.

I have multiple servers with about two dozen self-hosted services I run. It all started ten years ago, torrenting shows and then automating. And now everything in my life is self-hosted and backed up. But if I showed my current configuration to me 10 years ago, it would look undoable, completely out of reach. So my suggestion to you is to pick one project that you like, build it. Make mistakes. Fix those mistakes. If you want to access it from outside your network, use WireGuard so that nobody else can have access to your system and find your mistakes for you.

Don’t ask for advice. Don’t ask for opinions. That’s like going into a religion conference and asking which is the right God. You’re going to have a bunch of very passionate people telling you a bunch of things you don’t understand when all you want to do is tinker. So fuck all those people, just start tinkering.

Finally, Don’t host any mission critical shit until you have backups that are tested after multiple iterations. I have fucked up so bad that I have had to reformat discs. I have fucked up so bad that data has just gone missing. I have fucked up so bad that discs have overflowed with backups and corrupted the data and the backups themselves. It was all fun as shit. Because none of it was important. Everything important was somewhere else. The only rule is the 3-2-1 rule, otherwise go fuck up and come back when you dead end on an issue.

Pro tip, use ZFS and take snapshots before you make any changes. Then you can roll back your system if you fuck up. I just implemented it this year and it has saved me so many headaches.