Wow i was on a very similar setup last year software stack wise. I have a small pc i5gen 10 (eats way less than one might think due to the laptop hardware) proxmox on it running 2 debian vms one for home assistant the other for anything else pretty much that doesn’t require huge horsepower but through the weeks/months crashes and bugs i decided to move my media server to a separate box with native jellyfin install to make sure i have full advantage of the hardware acceleration. That machine is nixos but that’s a whole other story 😂.

I think constant iteration is the key/fun with self hosting. I can’t tell you a single thing on my not so long but very eventful journey that I regret. Maybe try to find what is actually “mission critical data” that you once setup you say i need this to be online and reliable etc so you can play more freely on a separate system be that a vm or anything. Oh and document everything you do will come handy 10000% i guess that’s the only thing I wish I could done better is finding a tool I like to document with. For me it’s like this: I start documenting then something annoying happens with the note taking app or it’s just bloated and I’ll unintentionally abandon the whole thing.

Anyway that’s me waffling 😂 Have fun and I’m happy to share all the little exp I have just give me a shout ✌🏽

I’m an absolute rookie here who listens to absolute pros and try to understand stuff. Here’s what Ive got: You don’t want to do this from your home network. Ideally you have a VPS running some entry level (unsure but my guess is you filter humans from bots )stuff then tunnel back things from there to your home network. You can use other solutions to do this (i think) like clouflared with a d. Also having a static ip as a consumer is rare afaik so unless you did specifically requested your ISP your ip might change the worst possible time (this im talking from experience lol) Oh and ofc the modern problems like the ai scrapers who’ll do 300 parse a sec if there’s any info for them to feed on. That’s all the scary stuff I could muster from memory and exp. I hope it helps and I’m not sure about any of this but I believe these are topics you could look up and educate yourself also feel free to correct me anywhere here

Sajt. Funny enough sajt is my default test word eg.: is google working let me search for sajt

Many might not like or bored with this answer but NixOS. It has more fresh packages than AUR. You can pin your version if you want or you can do what i did: i have most of my packages on stabile(which is super reliable and mostly fast to catch up) but I’ve defined that i want some from the unstable channel which is basically the cutting edge. Yes there are a few things missing when it comes to desktop apps but can use flatpack for those. On top of that you can program the whole OS to your liking and it won’t build if you fckup or you can roll back on boot if you don’t like what you’ve done. I’ve installed nixos to make my penguin friend shutup and now it’s my safe space really.

Lol @ 1am