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.
My list, in order of complexity:
Set up the pi-hole I bought. The thing holding me back is that I suspect I might need a new router too but the local ISP doesn’t work with all routers. This question I could ask on this forum but it is quite hardware specific, so probably not the right place.
Set up a jellyfin server on my home network. I have a 2012 iMac for which I’ve upgraded the ram and replaced the hard drive with an ssd. I’m hoping I can use it for this, and anything else I decide to host locally.
A server (or servers) that I can access over the internet, including:
The 3rd part is where I freeze. I believe I could manage 1 and 2 on my own.
With the 3rd part, I’d recommend going with Tailscale, it really helps for folks who don’t understand many things yet, and is super easy to setup. The free tier allows 3 users and 100 computers, so even if you need more, it’s easy to start with that, learn things and then change this aspect.
I would recommend Emby over JellyFin personally. I have used Plex, JellyFin, and Emby. Plex is removing the point of using it, JellyFin seemed constantly broken for me. Emby worked the first time, and has continued to work without issue since.
For pihole you don’t need support from router. It’s convenient if you can adjust dhcp-server settings so that pihole will automatically cover your whole network, but it’s not a requirement, you can just manually set each device to use pihole as DNS server. All you need is a static IP address outside your DHCP -pool. For spesific router configurations, you can ask those too, just include spesific model and possibly screenshots from your router interface.
That iMac of yours is more than enough to get you going. If you plan to run multiple things on it it might be good idea to look for hypervisors like proxmox or ovirt, but basic qemu+libvirt -setup on pretty much any linux-installation will work just fine too.
For the 3rd part, your concerns are mostly about networking and setting up pihole/other servers on your local network will gain you knowledge on how to manage that as well. Also, you can set up nextcloud/immich/whatever locally at first, get familiar with them and then allow access from the internet either via bitwarden or other tunneling or directly over public network. Latter has obviously way bigger threat models than using VPN and accessing stuff that way, but gladly the networking side of things is somewhat it’s own beast from the servers so you can build everything local only at first and then figure out what’s the best approach for you with remote access.