I'm an ex-programmer that became a school teacher a couple decades ago. I always kept my tech itch, and now that I have the little bit of extra time and cash that comes with being well in my 40's, I decided to dive in and give self-hosting a try.
Bought an old Shuttle, added 32 gigs of RAM and a To of SSD, and I'm good to go.
I also used the spare parts to boost my ISP's box. It's a neat piece of hardware that, among other things, can share files via samba and run VMs. It runs on an ARM V8, I guess it could be compared to a Raspberry 4.
So far I managed to prototype my network, only hosting jellyfin for now, but I'm all over my head in VMs and containers, so much fun, so many things I forgot, so many things have changed...
So my architecture is that I run Proxmox on my shuttle. One VM runs Nginx Proxy Manager and is my DMZ. Another one runs Portainer and a few other monotoring apps. Perhaps I could install those apps on my Proxmox server, but I haven't lookee under that stone yet. The last VM runs the services, Jellyfin right now.
On my box (did I said I love that little piece of hardware ?), I run a VM with AdGuard Home (because it makes sense that my DNS stays up as long as my connexion is up), I intend to had Privoxy (perhaps on a second VM if I can run it in 2096 Mo).
I'm really thinking about switching to Fedora, podman and cockpit. I find the ecosystem well integrated, less of a mismatch of parts I'm doing between Ubuntu, Docker, Proxmox... I'll give it a try, if only because I'd like to try something new.
Now I can impress my girlfriend with our own website (see, darling, it's even https !) and showing her stuff that goes blip blip with all the pretty lights (no mysoginy here, she hates computers but loves seeing me playing the h4x0r).
Many, many, many thanks to all the people that develop, maintain, document software; thanks also to all the enthusiasts who share their knowledge online, from the millionnaire Youtuber to the person answering a tiny question on some obscure forum decades ago that let me solve the problem I've spent hours on.
I know that I've clearly been overkill with my setup and could have slapped a TrueNAS on my server and called it a day. Tried it, but it was meeeeeee...