It can be a lot, I'm a year in and still feel like a noob. I've only just now moved from being behind a cloudflare tunnel to being behind a proper reverse-proxy. That doesn't mean anything to you yet, it will!

There's plenty of guides to get started. Louis Rossman did a 12hr guide on selfhosting your entire life (I still haven't watched the whole thing).

I started here with this guide: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IuRWqzfX1ik It's short, sweet, easy to digest.

If you wanna start super easy.

1. Buy a domain
2. Set up a cloudflare tunnel
3. Roll out whatever using docker
4. Point your tunnel to the docker ports.

This works around CGNAT, and bypasses the need for port forwarding BUT it keeps you reliant on a corpo and keeps all your data moving through their servers, which means low upload limits and your traffic could (see: will) be monitored.

Anything your exposing to the internet should be considered disposable until you know enough to keep a server online safely. Keep backups, offsite. If you have 1 backup, you have no backups. If you only have onsite backups, you have no backups.

Most servers you're gonna want to run will come with relatively detailed documentation for rolling things out, but when it comes to security you'll be on your own. This is because the optimal security configuration for your needs depends on your threat model. Until learning proper network security, I'd recommend paying for a VPS to host your servers on and connecting via proxmox or a similar tool, lest you risk leaving gaping security holes in your home network.

Have fun, happy selfhosting, feel free to DM me if you need assistance, I'm not on lemmy often anymore but my inbox goes to my RSS aggregator so I'll see it.

oh, and PS. Don't selfhost your email, it's not worth the hassle.