I started off with pi hole when i started messing around with an old laptop for self hosting. My advice is setup what you think is useful.

To access the server outside your home, tailscale is a great option. Fairly simple to setup especially if its just you accessing the server.

Reverse proxy would be best if you intend to let others acess your servers services often or if you dont wanna mess with tunnels. I settled on cloudflare tunnels because i didn't want another thing to turn on to acess my server outside my house.

When I didn't have a carrier grade nat to deal with, i used caddy server for automatically getting ssl certs from lets encrypt and reverse proxy all in one. I really liked that once i got it setup.

With most consumer wifi networks you can usually enable port forwarding. That would let you access services from anywhere.

Personally I would set up a Wireguard VPN server on the laptop and enable port forwarding only for the Wireguard port. This will let you access your laptop from anywhere, and it will protect you by limiting your attack surface (basically you only need to have a device Wireguard connection and you don't need to worry as much about securing every other service you want to run).

Then I'd set up dynamic DNS with any DNS provider so you don't need to keep track of a changing IP.

Then you can install whatever services you want on the laptop and you'll be able to access them from anywhere by connecting to the Wireguard VPN. It does mean you can't easily let a friend access a service on your laptop, but the tradeoff is you don't have to worry as much about security while you're learning.

You can, but if you don't control the main router and can't do any port forwarding, it will be hard to make it accessible from outside your LAN.

I think self-hosted cloud is a vague statement, but I think with your network infrastructure you will be limited in what you can do. I think cloudflare tunnel could be a good option for getting the device available online.

Then the self-hosted part. There are so many things you can look into. You can run everything in Docker, install the software you want directly on your laptop, and much more.

You'll likely also need a reverse proxy. Can use nginx proxy manager, traefik, or something similar for that.

What are your goals with the self-hosted cloud? That would help you in making it easy to find resources and others here to give you advice.

Edit: typo's

I have a laptop motherboard setup with proxmox running:

• plex
• radarr,sonarr,prowlarr
• opnsense
• foundry VTT
• pi-hole
• unifi controller
• qbittorrent
• kavita

This is running on an i5-1135 with 40gigs of memory. If your frugal about how you have stuff setup you can pack alot of services into old laptops.

When you say WiFi to you mean that you only have WiFi access or does the labtop not have a Ethernet port? If you have a wired connection I would get either a thunderbolt or usb3 adapter to hardwire it as a hardwired connection will be more stable even on USB speeds.

The OS will depend on what you want to host. If its a older system with less than 8 GB of ram I would just install Debian with docker. You can find premade docker compose files online which should make deploying software easy.

If you have plenty of hardware you could install Proxmox and then a few VMs.

Edit2:

Actually I take back what I said, don't use Kubesail. I went back and tried it and it has a lot of issues. If you want remote access consider a VPN or remote vm

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

6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

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I starter my home server with a laptop. I did nextcloud, paperless, jellyfin + *arr services, photoprism, and a few others.

Not having control over your network is the biggest hurdle because you kind of need a fixed IP to access it.

However, there are some services to broadcast your hostname to the local network (e.g. so you can log in with serveruser@myserver over SSH).

You may be able to use that to access your containers from the network, but just keep in mind that other users on the local network can also access your server.

Without being able to set a static ip and forward ports you cant host services and point to them with a domain, like driveway-home.com or something.

But I think cloudflare has a service that lets you connect remotely without needing static ip's (some one else will know the name). If you were to use that then you can use your laptop to host pretty much anything on the Awesome Selfhosted List.

Sell it