5 things I would tell someone setting up their first home server this weekend

Published Aug 27, 2026, 7:00 PM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path. Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. Setting up a home sever is one of those projects that can look gargantuan from the outside looking in, but in reality, it can be done in a weekend. The hard part isn't the initial installation, but all the small decisions you make in the first few hours. Most of them don't seem consequential in the moment, but almost everything I did wrong with my first setup was due to a few of those small initial decisions. If I were to go back in time to give myself advice before starting, these are the five tips I'd give. Pick your foundation first Your OS should be boring When most people start thinking about building a home server, they usually start with a handful of services they want to run. They've either seen them run by others online or come across them themselves, and while it's good to keep those in mind when making a choice regarding OS, I wouldn't choose based on them alone. Your server operating system should be the most boring, straightforward piece of software on your home server. It serves as the foundation for everything else you run on top of it, so ensuring stability is of utmost importance. A hypervisor like Proxmox is a realistic option if you're a natural tinkerer, but if you're looking for a more NAS-forward server OS, Unraid, TrueNAS, and HexOS are all excellent options. You can run stock Debian with Docker on top, but I wouldn't recommend it as the base for your first home server. Learn the difference between containers and VMs They're completely different When you're running a home server with any kind of hypervisor, you usually have two choices as to how to host a service. You can choose between a container and a virtual machine, and while they might seem like the same thing on the surface, they're actually quite different. A container shares the host's kernel and can be extremely lightweight, while a VM brings its own kernel and OS entirely, which costs more computationally but grants you much better isolation from the rest of the system. In practice, most self-hosted services belong in containers, and VMs should be reserved for things that need their own kernel or that you don't entirely trust. The trap a lot of beginners fall into is creating a VM for every service, which is a fast-track to having your entire system slow to a crawl. Decide what your storage layout should be This matters on NAS boxes Adding a service after setup is part of the process, but restructuring storage is a massive headache. Spend some time to figure out what your storage pools should look like before you go through with setting up services. This means deciding on redundancy schemes, whether you're mirroring or using parity, and what filesystem to use. My own pool is a straight two-drive mirror with 8TB of usable space, and I opted for native ZFS, as it seemed like the cleanest way to passthrough my pool to containers in Proxmox. Finish one service before you start setting up the next one Half-deployments can stack up When you first start, the temptation will be there to continue to stack services. I went through this myself: I'd start trying to deploy something, hit a roadblock, and figure that I'd come back to it after I get the next one up and running. And thus, the cycle would repeat. If you have a perfect memory or take excellent notes on everything you do, this isn't a big issue, but if you're like me, the next time you sit down to actually finish deploying that service, you'll basically want to start over anyway because you can't remember where you left off. Especially when you're first starting off, finish one service at a time, and everything will feel much less messy. Don't expose anything to the internet on day one Remote access should come later Remote access is where a first home server can become a massive security risk for your network if you're not intentional about it. Port forwarding is the lowest friction way to get there, but it's the least secure. The better default I'd suggest if you want access from day one is a mesh VPN. Something like Tailscale or NetBird can provide you access from anywhere without exposing your network. I run one for remote access to all of my services, and with both options, you can expose what you want to the wider internet with a reverse proxy if you wish, but only do so for things that you genuinely need to be publicly visible. Running a home server is one of the most rewarding things you can do Whether you're trying to replace a few subscriptions or just tinker with self-hosting, starting a home server is one of the best ways to spend a weekend. My only regret surrounding starting my home server is not starting it sooner, as it has quickly become one of the most valuable assets in both my work and in recreation. Start small with a solid foundation and let the self-hosting rabbit-hole consume you!