I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
Its only daunting if you want to do everything from scratch. Depending on your needs you could easily build off an existing platform for home labs and servers. Its more of a tinker / experiment / use existing, then reverse engineer the parts you need to.
A good article on Home Server OS is here:
https://www.smarthomebeginner.com/best-home-server-os-2023/
You can Find some good Self-Hosting projects / apps here:
https://selfhosted.libhunt.com/
And finally, here are two examples of decent, simple to install all-in-one solutions, Yunohost is my go to for friends who want to start self-hosting as it sets up everything including SSO, DNS (via Adguard Home) and Certs via Lets Encrypt all in a nice web gui and admin panel.
Yunohost:
https://yunohost.org/#/
HomelabOS:
https://homelabos.com/