1. You want to go from the bottom of that list up. Do the boring before the fun or you’ll have to redo the fun to make it work right with the boring.
2. PiHole. (After backups, before media apps)

Everything. Self host everything, even your pets.

I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.

Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.

Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.

I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.

A single user PieFed instance

The comments give some great advice on what to self host, but my advice to you before you start spinning up a million services is to DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.

Seriously, document as you go and you will thank yourself later. Document niche commands you found online that worked, docker compose files, IP addresses/hostnames, where you put that random config file.

There are some great self hosted wiki and documentation products out there, start with that, then build the fun stuff!

Check out Selfh.st

• pihole: DNS ad-blocker abd also a DNS (and optionally DHCP) server for your home
• Wireguard: VPN very simple to setup, for remote access to your services from outside your home. What I do: wireguard is running (as a server) on a VPS, with all the security measures in place (ssh password login turn off, firewall bocks everything but wireguard and ssh connection changed to another port, failban) then my NAS at home connects to this VPS, as well as my phone, laptop, etc.
• Caddy: reverse proxy to address your service using your domain, it’s easy to setup, actually it’s the only reverse proxy I managed to setup successfully 😅. You can use the Nameservers from your domain provider to point to your NAS via the wireguard IP address for connection from the outside, and Pihole DNS to point to local IP address when at home.

I would start with the NAS first. with a proper NAS and a solid network the storage requirements for the rest of your servers lessens.

for example, I’ve got an off-the-shelf NAS solution that hosts all my movies, music, etc that is mounted via docker in my Plex container on a different server. because it’s usually streaming to four different devices at any given moment, and the torrent’s running against the same NAS, I’m using a 10gbe copper line.

depending on your needs, a 1gbe should suffice.

having a NAS would also help with backups. I have a 5 bay NAS, one of them is dedicated for backups of both servers and cloud storage from the NAS (personal files, tax documents, etc).

also, when building your NAS whatever you think you need, double it. if you think 5tb is enough, you’ll want to get 10tb or even 15tb. I current run 15tb(8tb drives) in a raid 10 with a 20tb backup drive.

this kind of configuration allows me to run 1tb or even sub tb drives on my servers and reduces my overall costs to replace if anything goes wrong. with a raid 10 on my primary storage array I can easily replace bad drives.

the only time I’ll really hurt is if my backup drive fails. since it was so expensive due to the volume. but backup drives never fail, right? 😉

unfortunately because of AI all those prices have increased. if I were to build it today it would cost me around $1700. adjusted for current pricing my whole lab would probably cost around $10k (thanks ram!).

good luck and god speed

Technitium dns (and dhcp) server instead of pihole maybe, with advanced blocking app.

Personally, I am running Nextcloud (file backup mostly. There’s a bunch of other options too if you don’t want the "all-in-one"ness of Nextcloud, but I find that it has good integration with lots of apps), Immich (the best photo backup there is), Radicale (my first one, Nextcloud already has similar functionality I think. I use DAVx⁵ on my phone for this, Thunderbird for desktop), Vikunja (to-do list app, partly compatible with CalDAV. I pair this with the Android app Tasks[dot]org and it works quite well), and Forgejo (local git backup, I still use codeberg for cloud backup though). I can strongly recommend all of them, they all work fantastic! Tailscale is also neat to set up if you want to access your local network remotely.

One fun thing you can do is set up a little Minecraft server for you, any siblings/cousins/other family you have or your roommate if you have one of those. I host one using PaperMC, it’s just a survival server for just me and my sibling, it’s quite nice!

Bentopdf if you deal with PDFs

Omni-tools if you need to convert between 2 formats or units

It-tools for the fun of it.

All the things!

/thread /s

ETA: added sarcasm

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #54 for this comm, first seen 2nd Feb 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Headscale, for one. This is probably implied as part of one of your above stacks, but let’s list it out loud. Tailscale is great and all, but it’s downright icky to offload routing of any variety to a third party.

Immich. Turn off Apple or Google’s automatic scraping of all photos, keep usability. Even if you’re not a photo person, at least some of your users are.

Syncthing is or Nextcloud, or something in the family. This may already be part of your NAS plans.

One of the code forges like forgejo, gitea, gitlab. Even when not a developer. Self hosting involves configuration and if you can get that into text and into a history, it makes things so much easier. Add bells and whistles to your hearts content, but these are good suites for a lot of functionality. Forgejo does have federation on its road map, but it’s a while off still.

These are ones I find pretty ubiquitous. There’s so many options once you have initial infrastructure. Email, for instance, isn’t as daunting as the horror stories make it sound, though not as simple as many hope. My suggestion is to take time and do it correctly. There’s a lot of backtracking involved as you learn more, but it’s usually worth it. Best of luck!

I’m running:

• Easy wire guard - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
• Plex - plexamp is fabulous for music
• Portainer
• Immich
• Arrs - prowlarr - sonarr - radarr - lidarr
• Cloudflared - for tunneling via cloud flare

I have pihole on a pi for DNS.