In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I’m trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.

For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn’t make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home… Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I’m planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.

My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they’re in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it’s capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I’m hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That’d be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don’t do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn’t be that hard to set up, right?

I’m also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I’ve read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it’s clearly the better option, but I’m team Red and would prefer AMD.

Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I’ve read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.

That’s another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I’m not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it’s too much.

For additional context, I’m a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I’m not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that’s why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don’t want to obsess over it. Money isn’t much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.

Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)

  • @iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2•3 months ago

    My answer may not be quite as helpful for you, as you said you are a software dev and would probably pick up the more advanced options easier than me.

    But for me, I was asking extremely similar questions to you a few months ago (still my only post on Lemmy, lol). I ended up trying unraid, proxmox, and truenas.

    I went with unraid and have no regrets. It’s been super easy and I now have the all in one server box I’ve wanted for years.

    • @sodamnfrolicOPEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      One of the things I learned as a dev is not to overcomplicate things - my profession is very guilty of this and it bites us in the ass in the end 100% of the time. I’m slowly learning not to do that, thus, Unraid :) thanks for the info.

      Do you have any issues with downtime? Are updates troublesome?

      • @iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        I haven’t been running it for too long, as I just started putting this together a few months ago and took a while to decide. No issues with downtime though. Updates have been super easy with Unraid so far.