Like the title says, I’m new to self hosting world. 😀 while I was researching, I found out that many people dissuaded me to self host email server. Just too complicated and hard to manage. What other services that you think we should just go use the currently available providers in the market and why? 🙂thank you
Don’t self-host email SMTP or public DNS. They’re hard to set up properly, hard to maintain, easy to compromise and end up used in internet attacks.
Don’t expose anything directly to the internet if you’re not willing to constantly monitor the vulnerability announcements, update to new releases as soon as they come out, monitor the container for intrusions and shenanigans, take the risk that the constant updates will break something etc. If you must expose a service use a VPN (Tailscale is very easy to set up and use.)
Don’t self-host anything with important data that takes uber-geek skills to maintain and access. Ask yourself, if you were to die suddenly, how screwed would your non-tech-savvy family be, who can’t tell a Linux server from a hot plate? Would they be able to keep functioning (calendar, photos, documents etc.) without constant maintenance? Can they still retrieve their files (docs, pics) with only basic computing skills? Can they migrate somewhere else when the server runs down?