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.
I did want to come back and throw this into the mix:
It’s a good read even tho you may not understand all of it at this point in time. Takes you step by step from Day 1 to Day 21 with each chapter giving a straight forward learning environment. …and it doesn’t stop there:
Github repository: https://github.com/livialima/linuxupskillchallenge
Thank you. I actually saw this earlier today, shortly after making my post. I’m absolutely planning on trying it. Also, great advice on the documentation, so thanks for that too 😊
You are me, 3 years ago! I’m diagnosed with ADHD and what you described is exactly how I felt when I was starting out. I even bought a RaspberryPi 4B+ CanaKit which sat in the box for over a year, just like you.
3 years later I have the Pihole, OPNsense router & firewall, Jellyfin, Traefik reverse proxy, and a bunch of other stuff too. My advice would be to start super small so you don’t feel overwhelmed. It is incredibly easy to get overwhelmed with all of this.
For what it’s worth, before I started hosting anything, I started with NextDNS. I just set up my iPhone and computers (then mac, now mostly linux) to use that service. It comes with super easy-to-use instructions and you can start for free. If you don’t like it, you can always just delete the account and it’ll be like you never used it at all. Very low risk but doing this will teach you about DNS. From there you can begin to move to a Pihole and Docker, if you’re comfortable.
Feel free to DM if you want. It’s a great community here and we’re all a pretty relaxed group.
Whatever you do, and whoever you end up working with, document document document. Take notes.
And I mean on paper, in a notebook, something that can’t crash or get accidentally deleted and doesn’t require electricity to operate.
You’re doing this for yourself, not for a boss, which means you can take the time to keep track of the details. This will be especially important for ongoing maintenance.
Write down a list of things you imagine having on your network, then classify them as essential vs. desired (needs and wants), then prioritize them.
As you buy hardware, write down the name, model and serial number and the price (so that you can list it on your renter’s/homeowner’s insurance). As you set up the devices, also add the MAC and assigned IP address(es) to each device description, and also list the specific services that are running on that device. If you buy something new that comes with a support contract, write down the information for that.
Draw a network diagram (it doesn’t have to be complicated or super professional, but visualizing the layout and connections between things is very helpful)
When you set up a service, write down what it’s for and what clients will have access to it. Write down the reference(s) you used. And then write down the login details. I don’t care what advice you’ve heard about writing down passwords, just do it in the notebook so that you can get back into the services you’ve set up. Six months from now when you need to log in to that background service to update the software you will have forgotten the password. If a person you don’t trust has physical access to your home network notebook, you have a much more serious problem than worrying about your router password.
document document document…on paper
My handwriting has deteriorated quite a bit over the decades and if I were to document on paper, I probably wouldn’t ever be able to decipher it. I do back up my digital documentation in separate, multiple storage containers. I do agree with documenting being key to surviving your self hosting journey. It will also help others help you when you know exactly the steps you have taken or tried. One of my former bosses would tell me ‘If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen.’
Personally, I have tremendous issues with paper notebooks. I love them for random notes, but not structuring things. I started a blog a year or so ago, and it was very rewarding to document everything there. My blog is not online yet, but I plan to publish it within a month or so. If things are good, maybe the next week even.
I wanted to tell others that if you want any help setting up a simple blog for yourself, you’re welcome to ping me, I can help you with setting that up, and you may see what difference it makes! I so so so wish I had that done years ago, but at least I started already.
Agree with everybody else here: don’t pay anyone for this.
We’re all a bunch of people hating that everything costs so much, so we selfhost what we can.Use us, learn from our mistakes, make your own and start over when you fuck up to badly. We’ve all done it and still do it.
We’ll hold your hand every time you come back and ask for help, as long as you’ve shown at least a tiny bit of effort on your end.Depending on your timezone, I could hop in a quick Discord call and nudge you in the right direction if it gets you going. I have some experience with ADHD so I know from second hand experience how you feel.
My TZ is CET.Best of luck anyways!
That is very kind of you to offer. I’m also on CET, so I might take you up on that offer.
I’m not interested in self-hosting to save money, though. It’s more disillusionment and loss of trust with proprietary tech, which has me wanting to have more control. Also, I usually like to tinker with things. It feels as if self-hosting should be something I enjoy but for some reason I’m not managing to get out of my own head and start. If it was a purely technical thing, I’d have asked the question by now, promise.
Whatever you reason: let’s get you started!
Let me know if you’re taking me up on the offer or feel free to ask me directly if you’re more comfortable with that.
Happy New Year!
I’d say the same. About money, I’d formulate this differently: most of the people here would be happy to help for free, I believe. And the author could just ‘thank with a coffee’ kind of thing, if they feel like it. I see that’s as a very nice option for everyone.
Since you are just starting out, I will pass along some advice that has been invaluable to me, and that is to take notes. I used to work for a firm in a non related field, but the rule was ‘If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen’ and that has carried over into my personal life. Write it all down. At the very least, you will have a bread crumb trail back to where you started if the wheels fall off. Notes can also help others help you by seeing the steps you have already taken.
Also, don’t be under the delusion that those of us here woke up one morning, spun up a server and apps, and everything from then on was jippity jippity. For me it’s a process of:
Reading/asking --> doing/trying/documenting --> screwing it up --> rinse/repeat ad nauseam with much colorful language thrown in between, until I finally get it.
I wish you the very best in your endeavors, and I look forward to hearing of your selfhosting exploits.
I will just copy and paste an old comment I made about self-hosting. I hope it helps in some way!
I got started self-hosting using a small Lenovo Thinkcentre and an HP EliteDesk. Both are available to purchase for around 100 dollars on ebay. I have installed Proxmox on both of them. Proxmox is an operating system built on Debian Linux and is used to host containers and virtual machines. It has a great WebGUI to access the server.
Using Proxmox I have set up a Pelican container for game servers hosting, I run my own personal wiki, I have PiHole, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf and a lot more.
To access your things out of home you can use a VPN to connect to your own network or open ports in your router. I only had to open port 80 and 443 to expose my reverse proxy to the internet and then I use the reverse proxy to route the traffic internally to the correct port and project. I also purchases a domain name and now I can use jellyfin.mydomain.com or wiki.mydomain.com or whatever.mydomain.com to access each project I self-host. It’s very convenient!
Trying new projects is super easy and if you want to remove something then just delete the container. No old leftovers will stay on the host system. There are also community scripts available to make hosting even easier. It will install and configure the containers for you.
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!
Anomalous State of Knowledge is a new term for me, thanks 🙂 It’s so true though, knowing what questions to ask usually requires you to actually know what you don’t know.
Yes! I literally wrote the guy (or gal) the same thing personally, before reading any comments. Keeping a journal helps so so much! Start a blog if you can, I only started it in 2025 (having some random notes here and there before that), and it’s so so so rewarding!
Also, GPTs help a lot, especially when you’re able to verify the outputs. It’s somewhat challenging, to understand it’s lying, if you’re new to the topic, but I noticed it’s quite good at the simple questions, especially tech ones.
I’ve got an impression that rather a friend than a consultant is needed. Unfortunately, I’ve got none when I needed them so much. But I think I can be someone’s friend, so feel free to ping.
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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I wasn’t able to read all the replies, but I thought I’d like to state that I quite enjoy the community! So many people willing to help, and discuss things. I wish I’d found the community much earlier, when I just started the self-hosting adventure.
Though I would love to help, I’m no better with a list of unfinished projects :| I could help setup something over a call at one point but I am probably not a good person to keep you accountable.
I use TrueNAS (HexOS) to host Immich (Google Photos), Paperless NGX (Google Drive sort of), Headscale (Tailscale VPN), Syncthing file sync, Backblaze cloud backups, Emby, etc.
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 design help, and long-term support, not just a few questions answered.
This is a job. The kind of work that IT consultants get paid for. A fair rate would be US$100/hr, minimum, for an independent contractor.
It’s not wrong to want to reward someone for providing an above-baseline service, which is what we (usually) can at most do here. Among other things, they are literally asking for someone to hold their hand. That’s instruction-level commitment, not just “passerby internet comment”-level commitment, and I see it as fair to both request the service for a price and provide the service for a price.
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? 🤣🤣
Sure, I do side work sometimes. $180/hr, 3h minimum up front.
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.
With the 3rd part, I’d recommend going with Tailscale, it really helps for folks who don’t understand many things yet, and is super easy to setup. The free tier allows 3 users and 100 computers, so even if you need more, it’s easy to start with that, learn things and then change this aspect.
I would recommend Emby over JellyFin personally. I have used Plex, JellyFin, and Emby. Plex is removing the point of using it, JellyFin seemed constantly broken for me. Emby worked the first time, and has continued to work without issue since.
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.
When looking at installing pi-hole, I found this thread on reddit (RBR850 as a router is trash) explaining that:
Want to have your own DNS pi-hole? Nope, NG is harvesting that data via their DNS proxy that you CAN’T turn off and to apparently support orbilogin.com…when they could have just used Bonjour and not had to hijack it’s usability. Without static IP’ing everything in the house, you can’t use your DNS to see things that may potentially be compromised because all DNS traffic coming from DHCP-connected devices…now comes from your gateway rather than your device. Causing rate limit issues on your pihole and causing your entire network to go down due to failed DNS if you’re not running a dual stack.
Want VLANs? The option is there…does it work? Not correctly.
No prizes for guessing which router I have. Yay! The OP mentioned using it as an AP instead with a real router in front of it, which would require a new router.
All this to say, I have actually given this thought and done some reading. Sometimes my brain just makes my life unnecessarily hard, and I’ve learned when to admit I need individual help. So thank you for all your time replying to me, but I still want to hire someone.
Even if your router acts as an DNS proxy it shouldn’t overload any pihole installation unless you have a crapload of devices doing millions of queries per hour. My pihole manages all my devices (20-30 individual things) without any problems and even if I hit some rate limit it’s going to be a change to default configuration, not a immovable object on your way. Based on quick glance over that reddit thread a new router might be a good option, but that’s another easy-ish task to accomplish. I use mikrotik device and I’m pretty happy with it but there’s a ton of good options.
For hiring someone to coach you I can see quite a few of potential issues. People who claim to know what they’re talking about but don’t really have the knowledge, straight up scammers obviously, mismatch in personal chemistry which will make learning unnecessarily difficult or even impossible, some people just aren’t good at teaching even if they do know their stuff and so on. By all means, use your money however you like, but I personally strongly advice against it unless you can get some courses on (preferably local) reputable vendor. You can look for online courses too, cisco has a ton of courses on networking, redhat has plenty of linux courses and other big players have their own training and even certificates if you want to go that far.
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