In this video I’m basically doing a little self-hosting therapy session and sharing the stuff I wish I could go back and tell myself before I ever spun up my first “server” (which, yes, was a janky 2012 Mac Mini). I made a lot of dumb mistakes over the years, but the funny part is that little box stayed in service until recently—mostly because I deployed things without documenting anything and then future-me had to suffer for it. The big takeaways are pretty simple: you probably don’t need nearly as much hardware as you think, and things are absolutely going to break—often because you changed something at 1 a.m. and forgot what you did. I talk about why it helps to separate testing vs production (even if that’s just separate VMs), when self-hosting isn’t the right move, and why learning networking basics (IP/subnets, DNS, routing) will save you a ton of frustration. I also get into why I wish I learned Docker earlier (and actually learned it), why Compose/Portainer stacks keep things sane, and why organization and documentation matter way more than you think. Bonus: there are no “right answers”—the best setup is the one that works for you.