I started my descent into the depths of self hosting with an old phenom II black PC, I bought a bunch of HDDs and put them in a RAID 10 via mdadm and eventually learned my lesson about not using LVM on my Linux for my storage management. Having volume flexibility has helped immensely there.

I can echo some people’s recommendation of portainer though be careful as if you want to get into multi device docker management portainer has some limits on what you can do for free. I upgraded to their pro tier using their free promo for 3 instances, but then had 2 mini pcs dumped on me by my brother in law, which took me to 4 managed nodes which exceeded their latest limit.

I have since switched to dokploy managing my docker swarm, so considering this platform decision early can save some growing pains, dokploy also has built in management for traefik so it is pretty slick though I have been maintaining my own nginx proxy by hand(not even npm, just nginx and a bunch of service config files).

I definitely recommend pi.hole, something like AMP or crafty controller or some such if you want to host game servers on it still, duplicati is a nice web interface for creating timely backups of things, and supports a variety of cloud storage(I currently offsite to a backblaze B2 storage bucket which is AWS S3 compatible).

Blue iris I think is something I saw passed around recently for security cams, all the Arrs are pretty easy to setup once you get one of them setup. My one drive replacement ended up being own cloud, as I fought with nextcloud getting it setup the way I liked so had to pivot.

Link warden is a tool I have used for archiving websites and creating a shareable bookmark collection. Audiobookshelf and Calibre(plus calibre-web) make a decent way to manage audio and ebooks.

If you are sharing this server and its services with others I highly recommend getting some kind of SSO setup, I ultimately picked Authentik for this, it has great integration documentation for most popular services, now my family can access all my services without having 22 different passwords.

Outside of those recommendations I can recommend checking out some sites like selfh.st for some inspiration on the kinds of services you can run and figure out what your needs/desires are and do some A/B testing on some that operate in the same space to see which ones fit your needs better.

I can also say looking at the greeting pinned post in this community is pretty good as well to get some ideas. I posted my most recent list of services in there(though it is now 2-3 services behind since I am addicted and growing).

If your old gaming pc rig has a decent GPU in it you could also consider running Ollama and open-webui and host your own personal agentic AI. I really feel the sky is the limit when it comes to self-hosting.

Edit:added much needed paragraphing to my monolithic post so that they are better services with looser coupling.