This is a throw away account, in case I end up working with someone that reads this post.
I’ve been lurking on this community with my main account for a few months now. I have ideas on what I’d like to self-host but between my ADHD, perfectionism, and anxiety, I’m frozen.
I need help selecting and implementing an initial set up. I’m not an IT professional but I’m a reasonably advanced user, so I’m confident I can do the setup work and ongoing management myself. I just need someone to:
- Discuss the big picture of what’s involved in self-hosting and help fill in gaps in my understanding;
- Help me decide on the best initial setup for my needs and skill level;
- Hold my hand during the setup phase and make sure I’m not doing anything stupid;
- Ideally be available long term for the occassional question.
I’m willing to pay a fair hourly rate for this assistance. If someone in this community is interested, please dm me. You might want to use a throw away for that too, assuming this work can’t be done anonymously.
Alternatively, any suggestions for good websites to find a consultant, and what skills I should be looking for, would also be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best for 2026.
Edit: I appreciate all the offers for free help on this forum.
I perhaps didn’t explain well enough that what I really need is a knowledgeable coach, who can get me moving and provide guidance. I bought the Official Pi-hole Raspberry Pi 4 Kit a few months ago and it’s still sitting on my desk gathering dust. Embarrassing but true.
Some random thoughts about your points:
It’s a pretty damn big picture you’re looking at. Networking, backups, hypervisors, storage solutions, security and a lot of other topics are each big enough that you can make a career out of any of those alone. Obviously you don’t need to know everything about everything but as you learn more you’ll find more and more stuff to learn so I’d say there’s no practical way to learn ‘big picture’ just over a few hours of ‘lessons’. Also there’s a ton of variations on what one might consider as ‘self hosting’. Some will have setup comparable to decent sized company, others will have a single raspberry pi on top of their router.
Same goes here, it’s a pretty big field to go trough. The best setup for me is most likely very different from the best setup for you. Also with real world constraints (money, bandwidth, space available, electricity price…) the best setup is practically quaranteed to be some kind of compromise. Also, at least in my opinion, it makes sense to start with what you already have or can cheaply get, so that you’ll get something out of the system with as little investment as possible even if the first iteration might be a bit janky. Also your needs will likely change over time so the ‘optimal’ configuration for today might be wildly different from the configuration tomorrow.
This goes hand-in-hand with first point. You need to understand some basic networking, backup scenarios and proper threat mitigation against security threats, hardware failures, power outages and so on. Also there’s no ‘initial setup’ after which the system is complete as, again, your needs will change over time.
That’s why we’re here. Just describe your problems in a reasonably sized chunks. Don’t ask how to build a homelab but instead ask for something more spesific which doesn’t have a crapload of variables to figure out before getting to the actual problem.
For the money part, I’ve done stuff like this for companies (getting suitable hardware for their needs, setting it up, offering support…) as a freelancer and at least in here that’ll cost you 80-150€/h commercially. Even as a hobbyist I personally wouldn’t take that kind of contract as I heavily doubt that you’re willing to throw thousands of euros on the table (as properly going trough your list will take quite some time). However, if you can narrow things down and ask for something spesific I’ll happily reply to you around here for free if I happen to have time and/or knowledge about the matter.
So, figure out what you want from the system right now, what’s the first thing you want to build. It might be a hypervisor so you can keep experimenting with virtual machines, it might be a pihole for your network or something else, but you’ll need a pretty spesific goal. Then you can come back and ask more spesific questions and get deeper into the rabbit hole. Also, specially if you’re starting from scratch, there’s no such thing as a perfect setup. I’m working on a decent sized company with offices around the globe and even with those resources there’s still compromises with pretty much everything as cooling capacity, bandwidth, financial, man hours and other things aren’t infinite.
Thank you for your detailed answer.
I really do mean big picture, you’re talking about all the detail in that picture. My brain works best with a clear overview structure and an understanding of connections. It gives me a way to organise and keep track of the detail. I want to present my current understanding to someone and get their feedback on it. If I finally get my overview properly documented, I’ll happily share it on this community for others.
That’s my point - it’s a really big field and very individualised. That’s why I’d like someone to help me figure out an initial setup based on what I have and what I want.
The network access is exactly the piece that scares me, which is why I want to be sure I’m getting it right.
I expect that will be true once I’m into it. However right now I’m simply feeling overwhelmed and blocked. This is not a rational thing, it’s emotional.
Regarding money, those rates are in line with my expectations. I have some hardware that I can potentially use but I will need to do some investment there too. I’d prefer to spend some money up front on planning, rather than overspend on unnecessary hardware.
I could explain to you in pretty decent detail how to build a setup which could cover pretty much every imaginable scenario for a home gamer, but that would also be suitable to serve a mid-sized company who’ll have multiple people on duty to manage the servers, storages, security, networking and other stuff. Also it’d cost roughly as much as a decent house. That’s close to the ‘big picture’ you’re looking for and equally overwhelming than your current situation. I’ve been earning my living with this stuff for quite a while now and there’s still a ton of things I’m at a very much beginner level. Maybe the difference now vs starting this is that I actually have some idea on things which I don’t know and thus I know when to learn more/ask from more experienced team members.
Just like eating an elephant, this field requires that you take it piece by piece. You’ll learn new things to build both your setup and your knowledge further, but if you try to eat it all at once it just doesn’t happen. First you need to decide a simple goal on what you want to get out of self hosting. DNS-based ad-blocking on your network is pretty neat and setting up pihole will get you started. Also with that you don’t need to allow any external connections to your network. Plus if something goes wrong you can easily just return to where you started from and try again. Setting your own router with DHCP, caching DNS and other stuff is pretty neat too and it’s also pretty simple to isolate from the rest of the network so you’ll have your ‘normal’ stuff still working while you learn for new things. Whatever it is, set up a relatively simple goal to work for. Then you can start to ask questions like ‘is raspberry pi 4 suitable for this’ or ‘what subnet I should use for my homelab’ or even ‘how to install debian on a old laptop to run pihole’.
Or if you really insist on going to the deep end, go to library and pick up TCP/IP Network Administration from O’reilly (altough that might be a bit outdated by now) or something similar and dig in. The o’reilly one has a bit over 700 pages to go trough. There’s equally in-depth books for linux administration, firewalls, network security and so on. Annas archive will most likely have some decent books too if you don’t care about legal issues and want to go trough brick-sized books as pdfs.