What do you want to do? You could try to Ppick a problem and then find a service to solve it. Maybe a pi hole ad blocker, or homeassistant for home automation. Both of these run well on a pi. Then follow the guide to deploy those services.

usually I get a lot of my info from youtube channels I like to watch; just seeing what they’re up to and if it’ll be relevant to me or just entertainment. some channels I enjoy are hardware haven, raid owl, techno tim, and christian lempa. I’m not super knowledgeable and also pretty new to self hosting but these guys have helped me a lot so I figure I pass em on and hope you gain from their knowledge as well!

All good suggestions, but mine is: Start with something redundant.

Do you use Google Drive? Set up Nextcloud and use both for a while.

Also, decide on user management first. It’s way better to have a central system for managing passwords/etc. Personally I use an Active Directory based off Samba4: https://github.com/Fmstrat/samba-domain because it’s got LDAP and expandable with Keycloak to OAuth and OIDC. This may sound overwhelming, but once you learn what they are, its fairly straight forward.

Software: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

Guide: https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide

As a beginner you might want to start out with one of the all-in-one turnkey operating systems like yunohost.org , dietPi.com or unRaid or a bunch of others (see the awesome-selfhosted list)

I think this question has been raised a few times here and I’m not aware of any “guide for dummies”.

Self-hosting is a wide topic and most of the knowledge is spread across the internet. I’d recommend going to communities like the one you just posted on, reading wikis and learning how to efficiently find information on the web. Most of the knowledge I accumulated over the years come from so many different places so I can’t think of a centralized knowledge base.

If you really want to have a handbook you can refer to you’ll have to write it yourself with your experience about your specific setup and environment.

Also, I started with a pi, added a synology (a NAS is a game changer), and then moved almost all services off the synology to a Beelink S12 pro. Recently upgraded the S12 to 32GB of memory, and I have a 2tb ssd upgrade I have to do soon. All of this is over the past 2-years.

Two sites that really helped me get the basics of docker compose were Marius hosting and Dr Frankenstein’s docker guides. Both are focused more on synology, but the docker stuff works anywhere.

ETA: linuxserver.io is pretty handy, too.