Are you in the US? If so, what state? This might be one of the few things I would never consider self hosting. There are so many legal issues you could run into, and if your self hosted solution fails, you’ll be fucked (to put it lightly). I’m an HR/payroll professional by trade, in case that helps.

I’m also a person that has always struggled to learn by solely reading. Typically a combination of video tutorials and documentation, while actually doing the work on my end, is how I usually grasp concepts.

This is something I have on my to-do list. I just need to figure out which router to go with.

Hack The Box looks like it could be quite interesting and fun. I think I’ll start there. I appreciate your feedback!

I’ll probably start out with just letting my parents access Plex to see how it performs. They would be remotely streaming off an Apple TV, so I’m not entirely sure how much, if any, transcoding will be needed. My other issue is that transcoding is uncharted territory for me, so I should probably work on getting a better understanding of how/when it might come into play in my situation.

Everything else you described sounds like it would fulfill what I’m looking for. I don’t plan on solely hosting “mission critical” aspects of my life on this (at least for now while I continue to learn and possibly break things), but it would help me take the training wheels off my bike.

Based on some of the other comments, it sounds like this might be the way to go. What NAS are you working with?

Thanks for the great info! What mini PC did you end up going with? I’ve heard Beelink and a few others thrown around here and there, and most seem to be impressed with what they can do. Do you mind elaborating some on how you handle your drives with this type of setup? Do you just have some sort of NAS connected directly to the pc?

I have been for about a year with one 8gb Pi 4 with a 500gb ssd. I bought it as a way to dip my toes into self hosting. Started with Home Assistant OS, but now I have a bunch of containers set up, such as Home Assistant, Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qbittorrent, and a few others. I will eventually get something a little beefier to host my media, but will absolutely keep the Pi running.

I figured email would be a common theme. I’m just starting to dip my toes into all of this, so an email server is not on my to-do list (and may never be).