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…)
I would suggest you start to play around with whatever machine you have in hand. Later on you can migrante to a more serious solution. If you want to first play on a VPS, Hertzner’s are like 4€/month
As for utilities, you could start with (in suggested order over my perceived usefulnes/coolnes/difficulty) Immich, videogame server, Jellyfin, Wireguard, Jupyter server (if you code Python), backrest.
When you want to scale up and migrate into a more “serious” setup, it depends on that you want and your budget. Still, I recommend a multi-disk bay PC (NAS), and go for a dedicated Linux distro (I’m using TrueNAS; not perfect, but overall a very good experience).