For this new year, I’d like to learn the skills necessary to self host. Specifically, I would like to eventually be able to self host Nextcloud, Jellyfin and possibly my email server too.
I’ve have a basic level understanding of Python and Kotlin. Now I’m in the process of learning Linux through a virtual machine because I know Linux is better suited for self hosting.
Should I stick with Python? Or is JavaScript (or maybe Ruby) better suited for that purpose? I’m more than happy to learn a new language, but I’m unsure on which is better suited.
And if you could start again in your self hosting journey, what would you do differently? :)
EDIT: I wasn’t expecting all these wonderful replies. You’re all very kind people to share so much with me :)
The consensus seems to be that hosting your own email server might be a lot, so I might leave that as future project. But for Nextcloud and Jellyfin I saw a lot of great tips! I forgot to mention that ideally I would like to have Nextcloud available for multiple users (ie. family memebers) so indeed learning some basic networking/firewalling seems the bare minimum.
I also promise that I will carefully read the manuals!
Unraid is not a backup. It is good, but if your data goes wrong for different reasons or you lose the entire device, you can’t restore it. Dedicated backups are a must for anything serious!
Unraid absolutely is a backup. That’s the whole point of the OS. And furthermore , the backup can be backed up at any time and stored on another device, allowing you to restore the entire OS and its configuration. And by “lose the entire device”, I’m assuming you mean the OS is corrupted. At that point, you simply burn a new USB and reconnect the drives, or move them to any other system running Unraid.