Selfhosted

I was on the same boat few months ago. Went for Debian OS and then docker containers for almost all services. Portainer is awesome web UI to manage all containers so thats what I install first. Starting up new services is about copy paste docker-compose with slight modifications for your needs. My server is accessible through wireguard connection and that should be one of the most secure ways and probably the easiest to setup afaik (downside of wireguard is that you have to setup each device to allow connection - AKA scanning qr code)

Just saying what I did, most people here are more experienced and Im still learning.

GL and HF

I can't point to any decent resources, but in your shoes I'd probably download a Debian based distro that's similar to what you used on your pi's (Ubuntu server or Debian itself), learn how to use docker (see the other post where a user is asking about containerisation today for community responses) and set up a reverse proxy like Caddy to safely host your content on your lan and once you've got it working on there then think about internet access and whether you want to go down the VPS/Cloudfront route for public access to your goodies.

Given how Plex is trying to diversify away from self hosted content, give Jellyfin a spin - it's surprisingly good and supported by anything with a browser, iOS, android, firestick, kodi or whatever!

Oh and by the way, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed starting out in this. My advice is to set yourself small, achievable goals to help break it up. Start by doing your hardware upgrade, then work out what your host OS will be and install it. Then work out how you want to use it, what you want to containerise, what you want to run in VMs.

be prepared to knock it all over and start again. Everyone rebuilds their environment, usually after learning how they could do it better. And most of all, have fun!

You could use a complete solution like TrueNAS or https://www.openmediavault.org/ but IMHO if learning is equally a goal you could also start with a standard Debian or Fedora Server Edition. Personally I use the latter and it is very nice to use with the Cockpit web-console and the good integration with Podman for running Docker containers.

Proxmox might be what you’re looking for, it’s very popular among homelab users and allows you to run VMs and Containers natively so you have the best of both worlds.

As to which you should use (Docker or VMs), neither is a silver bullet. I’m going to oversimplify it a bit, but in a nutshell:

Containers lend very well to microservices like web apps and processes you want to run isolated but don’t need a whole VM for. I can go into this in more depth if it helps you.

VMs are better suited when you have a disproportionately more resource hungry service (like database servers). They also allow easier deployment of things alongside the application, for example if you have monitoring agents. The downside is VMs add a maintenance overhead for the underlying OS (this is true of containers too but less so as you’ll often run many containers on one host).

In my environment I use VMware ESX for the hypervisors, manage it with vCenter and run mostly Linux machines with a mix of traditionally installed services and Docker standalone. There are some highly resource intensive services that even get their own physical host, like my NVR (for CCTV cameras) and backup server.

Hope I’ve answered more questions than I’ve created!

I'm kinda in the same boat. Super into tech and computers and know my way around Windows, Mac, and a fair understanding of Debian based Linux... But self hosting still holds many questions to me.

Today, i just discovered that you can use CloudFlare VPN tunneling to basically "convert" a local ISP provided IP directly to a public IP without the need for a dedicated IP. I'm still at work but I'll probably start tinkering with it once I get home. Would love to host Mastodon and Lemmy at home instead of paying a monthly fee just for some light to moderate social media use.

I also want to run some home automation stuff as well as a few static html websites. I know currently what is possible and the basic understanding of how it works, I just need more time to practice!

Feel free to hit me up in DMs if you have any questions or want to exchange notes. Seems like we're both in a similar place rn.