I am completely new to the realm of self hosting. I don’t know a single thing about how I can self host stuff. Regardless, I have the curiousity to learn it by myself but I don’t know where to start. I cannot find any sort of wiki or FAQ articles, nor do I have the ability to ask the forum for every single problem or doubt I encounter during the setup. Can someone direct me to a beginner friendly site that teaches all there is about self hosting and all the questions and misconceptions that come with it?
Additionally, is a self hosted server only accessible inside my home? What about accessing the services outside, like Bitwarden or Nextcloud apps that require syncing and availability of data wherever I am? If it is useless outside, there would be no point for me personally to self host in the first place since I am perfectly fine with using cloud services for now and the convenience that comes with it. Plus, no one else in my family cares about self hosting and I don’t wish to spend the effort to convince them to in vain, so setting up a server for convenience of everyone at home is also out of the question.
I started out by setting up a Pi-Hole for my house and learning and failing small to get my head around how Linux worked and how to actually use a command line / SSH / the works.
From there I went to the website https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/ (specifically this guide) which was extremely helpful in understanding the basics of services, networking, DNS, etc. I’d say that if you’re able to get a full setup going with Traefik on Docker, that’s a really good setup for success for self hosting just about anything that can be Dockerized (which is basically anything).
Now I’m able to just read the documentation for a service at hub.docker.com, figure out how I want to customize it for my specific setup (e.g. putting gluetun in front of specific containers, setting up cron jobs to automate some container tasks, and creating a suitable backup) all with my knowledge of how this stuff works which I gained through lots of trial and error with the above guide.
That’s really all there is to it: just diving in, making mistakes, and learning from them until you start to build your knowledge of how stuff works and are comfortable going above and beyond copy and paste.