You’re right, those risks do exist. Nothing in life is risk-free, and for me, the risk-reward ratio is worthwhile. I’ll be careful though, and I’m definitely going to keep learning from online sources, If it’s a disaster I’ll be back, then you can tell me “I told you so” 😉

When looking at installing pi-hole, I found this thread on reddit (RBR850 as a router is trash) explaining that:

Want to have your own DNS pi-hole? Nope, NG is harvesting that data via their DNS proxy that you CAN’T turn off and to apparently support orbilogin.com…when they could have just used Bonjour and not had to hijack it’s usability. Without static IP’ing everything in the house, you can’t use your DNS to see things that may potentially be compromised because all DNS traffic coming from DHCP-connected devices…now comes from your gateway rather than your device. Causing rate limit issues on your pihole and causing your entire network to go down due to failed DNS if you’re not running a dual stack.

Want VLANs? The option is there…does it work? Not correctly.

No prizes for guessing which router I have. Yay! The OP mentioned using it as an AP instead with a real router in front of it, which would require a new router.

All this to say, I have actually given this thought and done some reading. Sometimes my brain just makes my life unnecessarily hard, and I’ve learned when to admit I need individual help. So thank you for all your time replying to me, but I still want to hire someone.

Thank you for the offer, that’s very kind. I’ll definitely be coming back to this community once I manage to get going.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I want to self-host various personal services for myself though, not a piefed instance.

It’s natural to share different parts of your life with different people, at varying levels of intimacy. Something doesn’t have to be illegal or shameful for you not to want to talk about it at work. Using throw away accounts allows both parties the opportunity to keep a potential professional relationship separate from their personal account, which may give information about their private life that they don’t wish to share. I’m not ashamed of my main account, I’m just a big fan of sandboxing 🙂

My list, in order of complexity:

1. Set up the pi-hole I bought. The thing holding me back is that I suspect I might need a new router too but the local ISP doesn’t work with all routers. This question I could ask on this forum but it is quite hardware specific, so probably not the right place.

2. Set up a jellyfin server on my home network. I have a 2012 iMac for which I’ve upgraded the ram and replaced the hard drive with an ssd. I’m hoping I can use it for this, and anything else I decide to host locally.

3. A server (or servers) that I can access over the internet, including:

• cloud storage for files and photos;
• a calibre web instance;
• maybe bitwarden and linkwarden (or similar)?

The 3rd part is where I freeze. I believe I could manage 1 and 2 on my own.