Self-hosting your first three services
Start with a reverse proxy, a photo archive, and automatic backups — in that order. Everything else is optional until these are boring.
People ask what to self-host first and expect a list of apps. The honest answer is an order of operations. The first three services are the ones that make every later service safe and pleasant to run.
1. A reverse proxy
Before the first app, decide how traffic reaches your machines. A reverse proxy with automatic TLS turns “http://192.168.1.40:8096” into a name you can type on your phone, and it is the single place where certificates, access rules, and logs live. Set it up while you have exactly zero services behind it — it is never easier than that.
2. The thing you actually care about
For most people that is photos. Pick a photo archive, point it at the pile, and live with it for a month. One real workload teaches you more about volumes, upgrades, and resource limits than ten toy deployments. If photos are not your thing, substitute documents or music — the point is that the second service should be one whose loss would genuinely hurt.
3. Backups that restore
Not backups that run — backups that restore. Schedule them, encrypt them, send them off the machine, and then actually perform a restore into a scratch directory. Do it once a quarter. A backup you have never restored is a superstition, not a system.
Then everything else
Once these three are boring, the rest of the catalog is yours. Add the wiki, the RSS reader, the git forge, the dashboard to watch them all. Every one of them will sit behind the proxy you already trust, hold data you already know how to back up, and restore the way you have already rehearsed.
That is the difference between running services and collecting them.