• pihole: DNS ad-blocker abd also a DNS (and optionally DHCP) server for your home
• Wireguard: VPN very simple to setup, for remote access to your services from outside your home. What I do: wireguard is running (as a server) on a VPS, with all the security measures in place (ssh password login turn off, firewall bocks everything but wireguard and ssh connection changed to another port, failban) then my NAS at home connects to this VPS, as well as my phone, laptop, etc.
• Caddy: reverse proxy to address your service using your domain, it’s easy to setup, actually it’s the only reverse proxy I managed to setup successfully 😅. You can use the Nameservers from your domain provider to point to your NAS via the wireguard IP address for connection from the outside, and Pihole DNS to point to local IP address when at home.

A single user PieFed instance

I strongly recommend Overseerr if you are going to run a video server.

Forget piracy. I only host dumps of my physical media (which at least where I am is perfectly legal), but that thing has an database of international streaming soruces. I use it just as a watchlist and to check whether I have access to a thing on a commercial streaming service already. It is effectively Justwatch for your streaming media.

Immich is a pretty obvious thing, too, if you want to get out of commercial image hosting services.

I’d say, though, that’s a fairly ambitious plan, and if your self-hosted apps, your home webhosting and your NAS are all going to live on the same home server I’d certainly figure out security and backups before overcommitting. That plan is a lot of hard drives and failure points you’re gonna be wrangling.

Since you’re running Jellyfin already, you can put your music in there and use an app like https://discrete.app/ on iOS or something comparable on Android for a better UX

Invidious for YouTube without ads

Syncthing so you never have to mail files to yourself again.

FreshRSS for RSS reading

Readeck for saving articles for later (or wallabag, many alternatives)

HomeAssistant

Calibre-web for ebooks

PiHole

Joplin for self hosted notes

Searxng is fun for self hosted metasearch but has sadly been having trouble with Google lately

I’m running:

• Easy wire guard - https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy
• Plex - plexamp is fabulous for music
• Portainer
• Immich
• Arrs - prowlarr - sonarr - radarr - lidarr
• Cloudflared - for tunneling via cloud flare

I have pihole on a pi for DNS.

Pihole and NAS are for sure goats of self-hosting, however I recommend at least try to host them for some time and figure out for yourself if you like that at all. Then add things as you go, whatever you need you may find options on awesome-selfhosted.

Before you even start, consider adopting an ‘infrastructure as code’ approach. It will make your life a lot easier in the future.

Start with any actual code: If you have any existing source code, get it under git version control immediately, then prioritize getting it into a git hub like forgejo to make your life easier in the future. Make a git repository for your infrastructure documentation, and record (and comment/document too if you’re feeling ambitious) every command you run in a txt file or an md file or a script, and do that as religiously as you can while you’re setting up all this self-hosted stuff. You may want to dig it up later to try and remember exactly what you did or in case stuff goes wrong and you need to back off and try again. It might seem pointless now, but a year from now, you’ll thank me.

Especially prioritize getting your git stuff moved into a self-hosted forgejo if any of your stuff is hosted on the microsoft technoplague called github.

Check out Selfh.st

1. You want to go from the bottom of that list up. Do the boring before the fun or you’ll have to redo the fun to make it work right with the boring.
2. PiHole. (After backups, before media apps)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

[Thread #54 for this comm, first seen 2nd Feb 2026, 02:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

A Snikket server is cool.

Navidrome maybe, but Jellyfin also works for music.

Headscale, for one. This is probably implied as part of one of your above stacks, but let’s list it out loud. Tailscale is great and all, but it’s downright icky to offload routing of any variety to a third party.

Immich. Turn off Apple or Google’s automatic scraping of all photos, keep usability. Even if you’re not a photo person, at least some of your users are.

Syncthing is or Nextcloud, or something in the family. This may already be part of your NAS plans.

One of the code forges like forgejo, gitea, gitlab. Even when not a developer. Self hosting involves configuration and if you can get that into text and into a history, it makes things so much easier. Add bells and whistles to your hearts content, but these are good suites for a lot of functionality. Forgejo does have federation on its road map, but it’s a while off still.

These are ones I find pretty ubiquitous. There’s so many options once you have initial infrastructure. Email, for instance, isn’t as daunting as the horror stories make it sound, though not as simple as many hope. My suggestion is to take time and do it correctly. There’s a lot of backtracking involved as you learn more, but it’s usually worth it. Best of luck!

Host Jellyfin

Some form of hosted musicstreaming integration with my local music

For the music, jellyfin can do this and it uses subsonic api which means you can connect to the music server with some mobile and desktop apps. Alternatively i like navidrome for more specialized music service that still uses subsonic api. Some people prefer not having a second service if jellyfin is good enough for their needs.

Automate Backups and push them on my server

For backups look into borg if your NAS doesn’t have anything native.

make all of the above things available where ever I want using my own self hosted domain.

Look into doing let’s encrypt DNS-01challenges via something like acme.sh if your domain registrar has an api. this will let you get your own certs for local use without exposing the subdomains on the domains dns. If you’re going to make them public then that is less important but it’s still a good way to automate renewals and deploying regardless.

run my own dns

Pihole unbound can offer a recursive dns server. Very easy set up.

In the long term I also want to be able to host my own webapps, since I will soon start to develop one for someone.

Now I want to know what suggestions do you have, for stuff thats really cool and that I can selfhost.

Outside of the obvious segmenting public zones and firewall, you could self host an SSO service. This would allow you to easily put forward auth on a dev build if you were needing to keep it selectively private until/if you made it public.

In general though, i just wait until i come across a problem or need and then i see if a service exists to solve that. Occasionally looking through the awesome selfhosted list or similar helps find blind spots i didn’t know i had.