I use Filebrowser Quantum if you are happy opening up a port for it. It supports 2fa. Also requires Docker which isn’t too difficult.

I ran Blue Iris, but despite my love for it, my disdain at having to run it on Windows made me move away. You can run it still in a VM, but it’s not ideal, and also not meeting your requirement of moving off Windows.

I would recommend Home Assistant with Music Assistant for music playback of local library files, and that gives you a web page controller. I see Home Assistant also integrates iSpy DVR. No experience of iSpy, but the Music Assistant integration is superb. I use it to stream all music at home for the family to Chromecasts etc and this way everyone just accesses the same web portal.

Home Assistant can be Docker or it’s own OS.

Perhaps not the size you’re after, but I have a HP Z1 G5, i9-9900, 5 SSD, 3 HDD, and that can idle as low as 45W and costs me £60/yr in electric. I managed to pick it up off eBay for only £260 (discounted from £350; if you keep an eye on certain things, sellers drop prices to rid of their gear).

I can’t quite figure out the downvotes to my first reply for suggesting backups and docker… I think my mention of Windows did it (do please avoid Windows for what it’s worth).

If you have reliable, easy to access backups, then it takes away the doubt of self-hosting. Hence the suggestion for Backblaze as it’s so easy to implement. Put in an encryption key and your remote data is private. I use it for everything except Plex media, which is something I wouldn’t care if I lost.

I jumped to Unraid about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Docker on Unraid is as easy to use as it gets, and now my confidence with it has grown and my demands are getting slightly more complex, I’m moving to Dockge for Docker stacks, and Pangolin on a Hetzner VPS for remote access. Hetzner have a great firewall feature for your VPS, so you can lock it down to home access to get you started once you start on a VPS journey.

But I would recommend Unraid for sure on ANY old HP desktop PC from eBay. I got an Z1 i9-9900, 32Gb RAM for £250. Bonkers cheap for what it is.

Good luck!

Backup. I use Backblaze personal which is $179 for two years of ‘unlimited’ storage. All my important self hosted data is duped to some old 2.5" external drives connected to my work machine that then is backing up to Backblaze. I also have 1yr retention, so any deleted file is accessible for up to 1yr.

After backups are sorted, stick with the OS you know best. If Windows (I hope not), then HyperV for VMs is good. Try the official Nextcloud VM from Hanson IT. Nextcloud is a good catch-all, but it’s beaten by other specific tools. I now host all I need from specific Docker containers: photos, calendar, email backup etc etc

But I would say Docker. Docker desktop if Macos or Windows if your thing. Get to know docker and the world of self hosting is your oyster.

As what others say, keep it all to your home network and tread carefully when trying to remote access it all.

I’ve run Nextcloud several ways, the smoothest, easiest and most powerful being the official image by Hanssen IT. Run that in a VM and use their setup/update scripts to do all the hard work. I highly recommend.

I’m on Vodafone here in the UK (CityFibre), and they let me use my own firewall to the ONT, and give me a static IP for no extra cost. It’s a PPPoE connection with a VLAN id. With work recently I’m using about 5-6TB monthly data. I should count my blessings for their service given all I’ve read here!

I had issues with connectivity around 2020 and they wouldn’t engage with any help troubleshooting it unless I used their provided router, which was a pita, but a few days of speed tests and they escalated it and fixed it.

Just to say I’ve tried this today and love it. Was running Authelia but wasn’t happy with the way it was configured. I spun up VoidAuth in about 5mins and am impressed. Running as basic auth for a Caddy reverse proxy, this feels very slick. Well done!

Easy to follow documentation as well. Less is more sometimes.

I like the way you have it checking SMTP credentials in the background with a simple ‘this is not configured properly’ on the UI.

I’ll admit I’ve not tried Traefik yet, but I see Caddy as being to web servers (and reverse proxies), what WireGuard is to VPNs.

It does what it needs to well, with a minimal config file. And if I learn and get comfortable with Caddy, then I know it can do anything I will ever need of a web server down the line with no need for me to ever change setup.

For what it’s worth given the age of this thread and disagreement going on in it, I would recommend Unraid.

Easy for a beginner, with enough to take you up to intermediate level: a web GUI for pretty much all the required terminal commands. It’s been around for years, is not going away, but instead getting updated. Works on any old eBay hardware and most of all, the community there are very supportive of beginners. There’s also lots of YouTube tutorials.

It ticks all the boxes for easy self hosting. It’s just not for Linux protocol purists.

EDIT: I’m learning a lot from this thread, and it’s interesting to see how tolerant people are for self hosting. I would add in my vote for Unraid: it allows me to be dynamic with the time I have for self hosting. I’m sometimes extremely busy and don’t have the time to keep my self hosting updated, so the web GUI is essential for basic maintenance. Then there are times when I do want to waste an afternoon trying something in terminal and learning more, and that’s when Unraid again comes to the rescue. I couldn’t self host with 100% terminal, and neither would I want to with 100% GUI. The best self hosting platform is one that can mix them up efficiently and effectively. I am keen to try some others mentioned here, as some look quite interesting. However NAS is a massive element of what I need for my homelab, so Unraid will stay for now.

I think the thing with self hosting is that it’s a hobby, and when it goes wrong, it’s part of the hobby to figure it out. But in terms of business, then it becomes a risk. By all means try and use FOSS to improve solutions. I use a self hosted dropbox / file delivery to clients as it can saturate my 1Gbps fibre which is faster than most cloud file shares, but only because if it goes wrong one day, it’s a 2 min job to use a cloud solution instead (temporarily) and email clients with the alternative solution. But I would never build something up that only ever worked via one system.

Don’t just have data backups, have service backups. And in that regard, you may decide it’s just easier to do as others have said and use enterprise solutions from the start.

If using a self hosted Office suite, have all files duped into a single Google Drive account for example. That way you’re only paying for one Google account and have an emergency backup solution in place. EDIT: I’ve just recently degoogled and use Infomaniak in Europe for my office suite backup as its free for the 1st user. Experimenting with other non-Google/Microsoft solutions might be part of your journey.

You may decide the savings aren’t worth the effort in what you’re trying to achieve. EDIT: but I want to add that this is all part of the fun of what we do: thinking outside the box!

Sure, so I use Caddy as a reverse proxy for all my subdomains, the public ones direct straight to whatever service(s) are on IP:port etc, then the private ones only allow private IP ranges of which one is my VPN subnet, therefore only allowing LAN and VPN access. I then also have a section for each of the private subdomains with Authelia authentication which is omitted here in the caddyfile example:

(allowed) {
	@allowed client_ip 192.168.1.0/24 192.168.10.0/24 192.168.20.0/28
}

sub.domain.com {
	import allowed
	handle @allowed {
		reverse_proxy 192.168.80.8:8080
	}

	handle {
		abort
	}
}

So among my services I self host, a few need to be publicly accessible for work. For those I wish to remain private, Caddy only allows private IP ranges, plus then Authelia as auth which is set to 30 days. There is then the login of each service behind Authelia as well. It’s as good as it needs to be for my needs.

If I were only self hosting private services, then as others have said, I would put all access through a VPN.

Edit: I should add that of course the private services are then only accessed via VPN to the router (part of the private IP ranges). Caddy as reverse proxy also obfuscates the subdomain names I use.