I’ve been a Software Engineering Student for 2 years now. I understand networks and whatnot at a theoretical level to some degree.
I’ve developed applications and hosted them through docker on Google Cloud for school projects.
I’ve tinkered with my router, port forwarded video game servers and hosted Discord bots for a few years (familiar with Websockets and IP/NAT/WAN and whatnot)
Yet I’ve been trying to improve my setup now that my old laptop has become my homelab and everything I try to do is so daunting.
Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit, and so many more things get thrown around so much in this sub and other resources, yet I can barely find info on HOW to set up this things. Most blogs and articles I find are about what they are which I already know. And the few that actually explain how to set it up are just throwing so many more concepts at me that I can’t keep up.
Why is self-hosting so daunting? I feel like even though I understand how many of these things work I can’t get anything actually running!
I self host for the same reason I play Factorio, it’s a constant stream of solving problems and adding new ways to do things. There is a lot to do, but you don’t need to do everything right away. Like a lot of people said, just break it up. I use Vikunja to create a list of things I want to and then break those things down into hour or weekend projects.
There is a challenge in the “bootstrap” process. But once you get something going then its easier to keep adding. Stuff like “Reverse proxy, VPN, Cloudfare bullshit” is not super necessary at first. Start with just getting an app going at an ip address and port that’s only accessible on you LAN, then add the other stuff.