Selfhosted

Just kinda flipped through his guide. It's a bit dated on knowledge and techniques, even for beginners.

You don't need a computer for a router. Get a router that ships with OpenWRT and start there. GL.iNet makes good and affordable stuff. Use that for your ad blocking, VPN, and so on to get started.

I'd just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.

If you want to run other heavier services, start out with a low-power minipc until you're settled on what your needs or limitations are. You can get a very capable AMD minipc for $250-300, or an n100 low-power for a bit cheaper. Check out Minisforum units for this. Reliable, good price, and solid warranty.

If you deal in heavy storage, maybe consider adding a NAS to the mix, but maybe that's a further steps. OpenWRT is a good starting point just to get your basic network services and remote access up, then just move on from there.

A good and fun starting point for some people is setting up Home Assistant on a minipc or Raspberry Pi (honestly, the costs of Pi boards now is insane. Might be good just to get the minipc).

I wouldn't trust his guides personally. He has some hot takes and more importantly he isn't someone who really knows the Homelab/self hosting landscape.

If you are looking for guides I would find channels that have done series on whatever you are interested in there is plenty of quality material.

To start off here is what I would do.

First, get a wireless router that is capable of running OpenWRT and then get a switch to accompany it.

Next go to eBay and buy 3 used workstations. They don't need to be fancy and you can always upgrade them later. You need 3 for later.

Next find some storage. You can find decent Sata SSDs for pretty cheap. If you are looking to store something bigger like a movie collection also pickup some larger drives. With the extra drives make sure you buy a sata or SAS pcie card. This is because you need a dedicated controller to passthough to a VM.

Once you have all that you can start installing Proxmox. You probably want a raid 1 configuration so that you can replace a disk without downtime. The reason I say three devices is because you need 3 machines to get consensus in the cluster. When consensus is lost affected devices go into what is called fencing which is where it freezes all VMs and operations to prevent split brain from happening.

Technically this is probably a bit overkill but I like having a solid base for experimentation and flexibility. Doing it right from the get go will mean that you have more power down the road.

For actually hosting stuff I would use docker compose inside a VM.

Just glancing through that guide:

OPNsense instead of Pfsense, because pfsense is going to rugpull, it's just a matter of time. I wouldn't trust the twats that run it farther than I could throw them because they're pretty silly people. Rossman suggests exactly this in the intro to the router section, he would change if he hadn't been using it for a decade already. Unfortunately, a lot of this guide is focussed on how to do it via pfsense and if you're brand new, you're going to have to figure out how to do it in OPNsense yourself.

Wireguard/Tailscale instead of openvpn. Faster and way easier to set up. Don't even try to set up a full LAN routed VPN, just use Tailscale for the services you want. And use it for everything and everyone instead of punching holes in the firewall.

He's definitely right about mailcow; if you're reading that guide for information, you are not a person that should be self-hosting email.

I would probably suggest just getting a Synology NAS or similar because it's plug and play.

I would not look at his guide. If you've watched any of Louis' videos, you already know this guy is a ranting machine. He can go on and on for hours about things. I watched about 15 minutes of his rambling and realized he had gotten basically nowhere. It's also one of the more complex ways of doing things. Use ZimaOS to get started with the easy button.

Stick with whatever router you have, for starters. You can upgrade later. You don't necessarily need that at all.

For the actual server I highly recommend this guy. N100 is very common due to being very inexpensive and efficient. You'll have to add RAM and an SSDs but you probably want to choose exactly how large that is anyway. It has 4xNVMe and 2xSATA, if you decide you want to expand later.

TLDR, the developers of pfSense are not the nicest people sometimes. If this bothers you, consider checking out OPNsense.

So first the author is arguing around on the router section that you should not buy a cheap router but then goes for pfsense instead of opnsense, i understand that when you are used to pfsense that you may not want to switch but recommending it for new ppl is just stupid. They have shown their hostality against their OS community in the past see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615896

This guide seems pretty dated in terms of technologies and approaches used so I wouldn’t follow it 100%.

You can certainly build a box for for use as a router, but you don't need to.

If your not planning to build out anything public facing and aren't going to run ipv6 internally, you can use any router to block all inbound ports and run everything over wire guard or tailscale.

There are a million and one ways to self host services. First question needs to be, what do you want to do and why. That will dictate the how.

Start off small, get an old PC that has an i5or better that's got vt-d support. start off with 8gb of RAM or more. Then throw proxmox on it and you are off to the races. It will save you a lot of money since you can run multiple virtual machines or lxc containers. This is how I started out, my proxmox host now has 26gb of RAM and its running very smoothly . i like opnsense as a router and firewall but its a little advanced but amazing, also get an access point and a switch and you can start building your network. You could also even run opnsense in a VM but that gets a little confusing but its an option.

There's a million ways to do anything when self hosting, so I'll just talk about what I have and if you interested just reply.

I only host a few services for now: Invidious, CloudTube, Redlib, FreshRSS. All of them as docker containers, this helps in quickly updating them and isolating their configurations. I have a few TB of disk space on the server itself that I can access through SMB3 shares, so I don't have a proper NAS yet. Probably will do so at some point when I need it.

As for hardware, I'm using an HP mini-pc with

• Ryzen 5 PRO 3400GE
• 16GB DDR4
• 256GB boot drive (NVME), 2TB storage drive (HDD)

This mini-pc can literally be opened by removing 1 screw, so hardware changes/cleaning can't get easier. I installed Debian on it

As for remote access, I use twingate instead of self-hosted wireguard. Mostly because I'm using my ISPs router and they like to reset it whenever they want. I'm also not confortable opening ports on the router. Twingate covers my use case completely so I never went back to this. I can map a custom domain to the server's IP and this meant I just switch on twingate when I'm out and can access it seamlessly.

I bought a protectli awhile back. Mines 4 port 2.5 gbps nics, and it runs opnsense out the box.

You should take a look at their sfp+ model, if I were in your shoes that's what I'd be looking at. It's all in one, works nicely, is incredibly customizable, and is lower power usage than basically anything you'll build yourself.

I use that for my router/firewall, then I use an off lease dell thin client to run my home assistant server, and a standard off the shelf buffalo nas. If you're into immich, I'll recommend jellyfin over Plex. I used it for years but they started collecting more data, sticking their own junk in etc. Jellyfin is open source and works great.

I purchased a firewall appliance with 4 ports and installed opnsense on it. Best decision of my self-hosted life.

Get one with two 10gbps ports and you are set. Passive cooled, small factor, Intel atom CPU. 4gb ram is plentiful.

On aliexpress can be found for 100€ or little more.

Even much better than an OpenWRT, which I love and use but delegate to internal network (WiFi access points) rather than perimetral defense.

Proxmox

Unraid

UniFi

Raspberry Pi

Docker

I don’t have time to respond, but exploring the capabilities of any of those things would be a great place to start.

Trying to create a router yourself is complicated. I knew nothing about it and installed OpenWRT onto a Netgear router and was unprepared. I ended up effectively taking a YouTube crash course trying to understand so many new networking terms and more. I got it working but any small tweaks could cause issues as I didn't fully understand what I was doing. I bought a GL.iNet Flint 2 and have been super happy with it. Save yourself a headache, get a good router like that and start having fun running things on a RPi.