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I've been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I'll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?

Additional notes:

  • I'm already using Tailscale (it's what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
  • I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
  • I'm planning on using Proxmox

Thanks in advance for the advice! :)

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[-] salacious_coaster@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

If you can, I'd skip the laptop and go for a used workstation SFF now. $250 or so would buy you plenty of server.

[-] jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

That's a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.

this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
28 points (96.7% liked)

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