Many given good advice on hardware, and there are plenty other threads with a lot of good recommendations.

Regarding OS, I would recommend to ease into it, and try some before committing. Just try a few services, how stable it is and if the configuration complexity meets your personal learning expectations. (Self hosting is only fun, as long as you can get everything up and running. If you need 36hrs of troubleshooting for every 2nd problem, that awe for elf hosting melts pretty fast.)

• OpenMediaVault
• Unraid
• TrueNAS
• CasaOS.io

I started myself with OMV 0.x, and since then it’s gotten pretty decent. But I switched to plain Debian and CLI tool. After learning enough using OMV as my starting point. I also tried FreeNAS in the beginning, but that wasn’t for me.

And I recently discovered CasaOS, wich is pretty neat and has a lot of benefits, but I haven’t tested it yet.

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

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

[Thread #32 for this sub, first seen 12th Aug 2023, 22:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I have been selfhosting for 2 years on a Ryzen 3600 bought from Aliexpress, maybe I paid like 90USD.

I use unRaid, which has been really easy to learn, you can achieve the same without it, but it's simpler for us newbies.

You can easily setup Pihole on it, but what I liked the most is how simple is to use NPM+Cloudflare Tunnels+Whatever you want to expose to the internet without having to open ports on your router

The first thing I selfhosted was Plex+Sonarr+Radarr, my friends and family loves it.

I was looking for something simmilar and went for DIY PC (I had some components laying around tho). I guess you want 7th gen or newer intel cpu (with quick sync) for easier streaming. I have cheap intel g3930 with 8gb ram, atx mobo and atx psu in custom case running silently at ~25W from the wall. Debian OS, OMV and pihole bare metal, and almost everything else running in docker. Nextcloud as dropbox replacement, servarr for media download/stream (jellyfin, radarr, sonarr, lidarr, prowlarr etc). Prowlarr can use any torrent/usenet and jellyfin is the best media streaming service imo. Duckdns and wireguard for remote connection. Im running 30+ services in total and looks like Ill have to add more ram if I continue increasing the number. I also have another pihole running on raspberry pi to keep my network alive if server goes down.

Im new in selfhosting and I found my setup as next level experience. Even my partner is amazed hehe

You may want to check out TrueNAS Scale for the OS, it is designed to be a NAS OS. You can run containers like Plex and PiHole from it.

If you are able to translate or German is your thing check this page out https://www.elefacts.de/test-153-nas_basic_2.1__mini_itx_eigenbau_nas_mit_4x_sata_und_passiver_4_kern_cpu

At the end of the page there are 4 build links shown. Starter to expert. I went the basic model route. They also describe the different NAS OS systems, I chosed proxmox.

I am planning to do something like what you want. I found this video which covers the hardware part of things. Regarding software I am a little lost too. https://youtu.be/vjDoQA4C22c