In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I’m trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.

For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn’t make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home… Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I’m planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.

My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they’re in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it’s capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I’m hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That’d be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don’t do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn’t be that hard to set up, right?

I’m also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I’ve read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it’s clearly the better option, but I’m team Red and would prefer AMD.

Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I’ve read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.

That’s another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I’m not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it’s too much.

For additional context, I’m a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I’m not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that’s why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don’t want to obsess over it. Money isn’t much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.

Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)

  • @linearchaosEnglish
    3•14 days ago

    I’m running something surprisingly close to most of what you’re asking for sans the immich which I’m waiting on stability from them first. That warning at the time of their site that says it’s under constant development and not to use it as your primary picture store is a bit worrisome.

    Unraid with 2 video cards

    • Plex Container (primary video card)
    • Plex VM (pass through secondary card handles DVR and backups and it’s also my steam remote provider)
    • Home assistant VM (running it in a VM is nicer than a container because of HAOS)
    • Jellyfin container
    • All the video services pull from the same catalog. I use jellyfin frequently but secondarily, it is my backup in case Plex heads in a direction I don’t like. They’ve already shown some indications I’m not going to like them in the future.
    • Deluge+VPN container
    • Cloudflare container (first set up is actually a pain in the ass)
    • Tailscale plugin
    • SearxNG container self-hosted search engine tool
    • Pi hole in a container
    • Pi hole on a raspberry pi

    Plex gets accessed remotely via its own remote capabilities

    Jellyfin gets accessed remotely via tailscale

    SearXNG is access remotely via cloudflare

    I have a secondary Plex server sitting on a raspberry pi with the backup pi hole

    I am preparing to set up a peertube. Haven’t had a lot of luck with the container on unraid. I run a fair amount of proxmox at work so I’ll probably just use proxmox for it.

    I run a separate dedicated system completely for my cameras. Not running frigate yet but I’ll get around to it eventually using blue iris at the moment.

    My unraid gets as much uptime as updates allow. I love being able to just jbod my media discs together and still have some protection with parity.

    I find the containerized version of Plex to be more stable than my VM version but that’s probably my own fault as I’m oversubscribing the vm.