For this new year, I’d like to learn the skills necessary to self host. Specifically, I would like to eventually be able to self host Nextcloud, Jellyfin and possibly my email server too.
I’ve have a basic level understanding of Python and Kotlin. Now I’m in the process of learning Linux through a virtual machine because I know Linux is better suited for self hosting.
Should I stick with Python? Or is JavaScript (or maybe Ruby) better suited for that purpose? I’m more than happy to learn a new language, but I’m unsure on which is better suited.
And if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)
EDIT: I wasn’t expecting all these wonderful replies. You’re all very kind people to share so much with me :)
The consensus seems to be that hosting your own email server might be a lot, so I might leave that as future project. But for Nextcloud and Jellyfin I saw a lot of great tips! I forgot to mention that ideally I would like to have Nextcloud available for multiple users (ie. family memebers) so indeed learning some basic networking/firewalling seems the bare minimum.
I also promise that I will carefully read the manuals!
Give Nextcloud AIO a shot. I installed bare metal the first time, but AIO has decreased my maintenance burden to next to nothing. Before that, it felt like every update would break my system. I’m a year or two into my transition from Linux nerd to self-hoster. I still fail at things on occasion, but I have learned a lot. I hope it goes as well or even better for you.
I’ve hosted NC for a decade, and the AIO was the first method that doesn’t make me dread updates. And I’ve used pretty much every method of installing it over the years, everything sucked.
I snapshotted every time before and update because I knew it was a crapshoot whether the update was going to crater the system, and I’d roll back and wait for a working update to come out. Before snapshotting, I had to fix borked updates about every second time.