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submitted 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) by Yesbutnotreally@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

Hey selfhosters.

I have a question about starting self hosting; I have run Jellyfin on an old MacBook for a bit and wanna dip more than a toe into the self host pool. Are there any guides out there you’d recommend for actual, complete beginners who knows nothing but wants to learn?

I’ve searched a lot but it feels like they’re pretty advanced for beginners. Is it just a really sharp learning curve to this, or am I not finding the good ones?

Edit: To clarify what level I’m really, truly at: I run the Jellyfin server on regular macOS and have an external 5TB drive connected via usb. That’s it.

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[-] Artaca@lemdro.id 3 points 3 hours ago

I started by running Jellyfin on my PC with so-so success. Next move was to get a raspberry pi to screw around with. That went kind of poorly (hosted a website that was quickly ransomwared, lessons learned). Ditched the pi and got some used PC parts on FBM to spin up an Unraid server. I've been using that for years now, with some upgrades here and there to hardware and storage. There are a couple YT channels with spectacular Unraid content for self hosting. Trash guides for the arr stack. Years later and I now handle multiple servers using either Unraid or Portainer.

As others have said, it's a very personal journey. Best of luck, happy to try and answer questions you may have.

this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2026
47 points (98.0% liked)

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