This is a throw away account, in case I end up working with someone that reads this post.
I’ve been lurking on this community with my main account for a few months now. I have ideas on what I’d like to self-host but between my ADHD, perfectionism, and anxiety, I’m frozen.
I need help selecting and implementing an initial set up. I’m not an IT professional but I’m a reasonably advanced user, so I’m confident I can do the setup work and ongoing management myself. I just need someone to:
- Discuss the big picture of what’s involved in self-hosting and help fill in gaps in my understanding;
- Help me decide on the best initial setup for my needs and skill level;
- Hold my hand during the setup phase and make sure I’m not doing anything stupid;
- Ideally be available long term for the occassional question.
I’m willing to pay a fair hourly rate for this assistance. If someone in this community is interested, please dm me. You might want to use a throw away for that too, assuming this work can’t be done anonymously.
Alternatively, any suggestions for good websites to find a consultant, and what skills I should be looking for, would also be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best for 2026.
Edit: I appreciate all the offers for free help on this forum.
I perhaps didn’t explain well enough that what I really need is a knowledgeable coach, who can get me moving and provide guidance. I bought the Official Pi-hole Raspberry Pi 4 Kit a few months ago and it’s still sitting on my desk gathering dust. Embarrassing but true.
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I see myself in your profile. It took me ages to take the leap.
I first tried seeking help in r/selfhosted and got discouraged by the elitist community.
I just ate dozens of hours of YouTube content, bought a Raspberry Pi 4, and failed numerous times.
The fact is, I was stuck in the anomalous state of knowledge.
So just go ahead, hit and miss, but as an ADHD, document everything. EVERYTHING. Every step you take, every thing you learn.
The community here is a lot friendlier than Reddit’s, so don’t be afraid of asking, as long as it’s well formulated.
And one thing I didn’t have when I took my first steps is AI. It was made for this: getting out of the anomalous state of knowledge. It will help you define what’s missing so you can ask the proper questions.
Have fun learning!
Some random thoughts about your points:
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It’s a pretty damn big picture you’re looking at. Networking, backups, hypervisors, storage solutions, security and a lot of other topics are each big enough that you can make a career out of any of those alone. Obviously you don’t need to know everything about everything but as you learn more you’ll find more and more stuff to learn so I’d say there’s no practical way to learn ‘big picture’ just over a few hours of ‘lessons’. Also there’s a ton of variations on what one might consider as ‘self hosting’. Some will have setup comparable to decent sized company, others will have a single raspberry pi on top of their router.
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Same goes here, it’s a pretty big field to go trough. The best setup for me is most likely very different from the best setup for you. Also with real world constraints (money, bandwidth, space available, electricity price…) the best setup is practically quaranteed to be some kind of compromise. Also, at least in my opinion, it makes sense to start with what you already have or can cheaply get, so that you’ll get something out of the system with as little investment as possible even if the first iteration might be a bit janky. Also your needs will likely change over time so the ‘optimal’ configuration for today might be wildly different from the configuration tomorrow.
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This goes hand-in-hand with first point. You need to understand some basic networking, backup scenarios and proper threat mitigation against security threats, hardware failures, power outages and so on. Also there’s no ‘initial setup’ after which the system is complete as, again, your needs will change over time.
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That’s why we’re here. Just describe your problems in a reasonably sized chunks. Don’t ask how to build a homelab but instead ask for something more spesific which doesn’t have a crapload of variables to figure out before getting to the actual problem.
For the money part, I’ve done stuff like this for companies (getting suitable hardware for their needs, setting it up, offering support…) as a freelancer and at least in here that’ll cost you 80-150€/h commercially. Even as a hobbyist I personally wouldn’t take that kind of contract as I heavily doubt that you’re willing to throw thousands of euros on the table (as properly going trough your list will take quite some time). However, if you can narrow things down and ask for something spesific I’ll happily reply to you around here for free if I happen to have time and/or knowledge about the matter.
So, figure out what you want from the system right now, what’s the first thing you want to build. It might be a hypervisor so you can keep experimenting with virtual machines, it might be a pihole for your network or something else, but you’ll need a pretty spesific goal. Then you can come back and ask more spesific questions and get deeper into the rabbit hole. Also, specially if you’re starting from scratch, there’s no such thing as a perfect setup. I’m working on a decent sized company with offices around the globe and even with those resources there’s still compromises with pretty much everything as cooling capacity, bandwidth, financial, man hours and other things aren’t infinite.
Thank you for your detailed answer.
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I really do mean big picture, you’re talking about all the detail in that picture. My brain works best with a clear overview structure and an understanding of connections. It gives me a way to organise and keep track of the detail. I want to present my current understanding to someone and get their feedback on it. If I finally get my overview properly documented, I’ll happily share it on this community for others.
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That’s my point - it’s a really big field and very individualised. That’s why I’d like someone to help me figure out an initial setup based on what I have and what I want.
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The network access is exactly the piece that scares me, which is why I want to be sure I’m getting it right.
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I expect that will be true once I’m into it. However right now I’m simply feeling overwhelmed and blocked. This is not a rational thing, it’s emotional.
Regarding money, those rates are in line with my expectations. I have some hardware that I can potentially use but I will need to do some investment there too. I’d prefer to spend some money up front on planning, rather than overspend on unnecessary hardware.
However right now I’m simply feeling overwhelmed and blocked.
I could explain to you in pretty decent detail how to build a setup which could cover pretty much every imaginable scenario for a home gamer, but that would also be suitable to serve a mid-sized company who’ll have multiple people on duty to manage the servers, storages, security, networking and other stuff. Also it’d cost roughly as much as a decent house. That’s close to the ‘big picture’ you’re looking for and equally overwhelming than your current situation. I’ve been earning my living with this stuff for quite a while now and there’s still a ton of things I’m at a very much beginner level. Maybe the difference now vs starting this is that I actually have some idea on things which I don’t know and thus I know when to learn more/ask from more experienced team members.
Just like eating an elephant, this field requires that you take it piece by piece. You’ll learn new things to build both your setup and your knowledge further, but if you try to eat it all at once it just doesn’t happen. First you need to decide a simple goal on what you want to get out of self hosting. DNS-based ad-blocking on your network is pretty neat and setting up pihole will get you started. Also with that you don’t need to allow any external connections to your network. Plus if something goes wrong you can easily just return to where you started from and try again. Setting your own router with DHCP, caching DNS and other stuff is pretty neat too and it’s also pretty simple to isolate from the rest of the network so you’ll have your ‘normal’ stuff still working while you learn for new things. Whatever it is, set up a relatively simple goal to work for. Then you can start to ask questions like ‘is raspberry pi 4 suitable for this’ or ‘what subnet I should use for my homelab’ or even ‘how to install debian on a old laptop to run pihole’.
Or if you really insist on going to the deep end, go to library and pick up TCP/IP Network Administration from O’reilly (altough that might be a bit outdated by now) or something similar and dig in. The o’reilly one has a bit over 700 pages to go trough. There’s equally in-depth books for linux administration, firewalls, network security and so on. Annas archive will most likely have some decent books too if you don’t care about legal issues and want to go trough brick-sized books as pdfs.
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Just ask your questions here. You’ll pay a ridiculous amount for help at real consultant rates.
Why are you going to pay for that when there is a huge selfhosted community willing to help and answer any question.
Because they want step-by-step guidance and support, and even design help, not just a few questions answered.
I would be happy to accept money, but I’m with everyone else here, just ask your questions and you’ll get answers.
But before you even get started, I have a question for you since it’s not indicated anywhere in your post. What do you want to self host? Do you want a media server (jellyfin)? Cloud storage? A federated service like Lemmy? Do you want to share these services with people outside of your home? Whatever knowledge gaps you want filled are going to depend on this.
I will say that a decent step 0 is finding a computer that you can put Linux on. It can be an old laptop that’s gathering dust, or, if you’re just trying to dip your toes and get a feel for it, you can try using a VM or WSL on your main computer (I’m assuming you have a computer with windows)
My list, in order of complexity:
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Set up the pi-hole I bought. The thing holding me back is that I suspect I might need a new router too but the local ISP doesn’t work with all routers. This question I could ask on this forum but it is quite hardware specific, so probably not the right place.
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Set up a jellyfin server on my home network. I have a 2012 iMac for which I’ve upgraded the ram and replaced the hard drive with an ssd. I’m hoping I can use it for this, and anything else I decide to host locally.
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A server (or servers) that I can access over the internet, including:
- cloud storage for files and photos;
- a calibre web instance;
- maybe bitwarden and linkwarden (or similar)?
The 3rd part is where I freeze. I believe I could manage 1 and 2 on my own.
For pihole you don’t need support from router. It’s convenient if you can adjust dhcp-server settings so that pihole will automatically cover your whole network, but it’s not a requirement, you can just manually set each device to use pihole as DNS server. All you need is a static IP address outside your DHCP -pool. For spesific router configurations, you can ask those too, just include spesific model and possibly screenshots from your router interface.
That iMac of yours is more than enough to get you going. If you plan to run multiple things on it it might be good idea to look for hypervisors like proxmox or ovirt, but basic qemu+libvirt -setup on pretty much any linux-installation will work just fine too.
For the 3rd part, your concerns are mostly about networking and setting up pihole/other servers on your local network will gain you knowledge on how to manage that as well. Also, you can set up nextcloud/immich/whatever locally at first, get familiar with them and then allow access from the internet either via bitwarden or other tunneling or directly over public network. Latter has obviously way bigger threat models than using VPN and accessing stuff that way, but gladly the networking side of things is somewhat it’s own beast from the servers so you can build everything local only at first and then figure out what’s the best approach for you with remote access.
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Imo this community should have you covered for items 1,2 & 4. Item 3 maybe; but we all do stupid things sometimes. It’s part of the learning process.
Agreed.
On a separate note, do we need to discuss your water adhesion issues? 🤣🤣
Unless you want to go professional or do something for profit, I’d just get some cheap old box and start mucking about. Just make sure you don’t put any important data on it and be prepared to wipe it and start from scratch a few times. After a while you’ll have a better idea of what you want to do and a clearer way forward.
I see you’re getting lots of advice just to use c/selfhosted as a free consultant. That’s good advice if you’re self-motivated and focused.
If you want someone to be a coach through the process, to keep you focused and moving, that’s a) a slightly different skillset and b) worth putting in the description. I mention this only because I have a bunch of aspirational projects on my to–do list that have just sat there for literally years because of perfectionism, anxiety, and maybe some undiagnosed ADHD. I’ll also counter by noting that a lot of people, this time of year, buy a gym membership on the theory that spending the money will somehow force them actually to go to the gym, only to find that spent money is not actually a motivator.
A coach is the right word, thank you for that. I edited my post to clarify.
This isn’t a New Year’s thing - I’ve been debating this for a few months now. It’s also not about using money as a motivater because that doesn’t work for me. I just find that body doubling / external accountability really helps me. Sometimes you just have to accept who you are and pay the ADHD tax 🙃
Just ask ChatGPT honestly.
You can self host things on one machine, all in containers. And just back up the data with a simple script easy enough.
Self hosting what? I assume a piefed instance, but knowing for sure would be good. I host mastodon, but not piefed. The differences between those should be relatively minor.
The basics are similar:
- Chose a backend platform (a vm in someone else’s cloud, your own network, etc.)
- Spin up a vm
- load docker or similar (I use both docker and k3s)
- Instantiate your containers
- get a domain chosen and ssl certs in place
- put a reverse proxy in place
- open everything up to the world
- profit
I’d start simple and grow as you become more confident in your skills. It’s not rocket surgery - if you have advanced skills, you’ll be fine. Even playing with 1-6 above would be good for skill building.
There is nothing illegal about what you’ve stated thus far - so I’m not sure why you are approaching this from a secretive “throw away” standpoint. Why do you think secrecy is needed?
Your number 1 question can be quite involved, so that probably needs to be probed the most.
For 2 I’d do docker - very simple and straightforward.
For 3 it’s just getting your vm setup right. I’d probably recommend Ubuntu server and then put docker on that. Tons of guides for doing that. You could use other OS flavors, but Ubuntu is a good first choice.
It’s not rocket surgery
Easyto say for a rocket appliancists.
Nor is it brain science… :)
Yeah, I guess over my life I’ve acquired a lot of knowledge in a very niche field. I think of it as relatively easy, but I know it isn’t easy for everyone. But, hey, that’s why there are so many of us willing to teach you how to fish.
Solid advice.
To selfhost you first need to know what you want to do, do you want your own vpn service? your website? home assistant? then you decide what you need to host it and start building from that.
I, for example, started the serious journey in 2016 with a raspberry pi 3 with pihole, samba and qbittorrent, and started from that and now I have my own rack.
Agreed - answering the first questions - and deciding where you are willing to accept risk is a huge portion of the process.
Raspberry Pi’s are a huge gateway drug. :) My kubernetes cluster is 4 pi 4B’s in a rack. Great for learning and polishing skills.
I’m happy to help with self-hosting, have a Homelab and VPS myself and work as a Sysadmin. :)
