This is a throw away account, in case I end up working with someone that reads this post.

I’ve been lurking on this community with my main account for a few months now. I have ideas on what I’d like to self-host but between my ADHD, perfectionism, and anxiety, I’m frozen.

I need help selecting and implementing an initial set up. I’m not an IT professional but I’m a reasonably advanced user, so I’m confident I can do the setup work and ongoing management myself. I just need someone to:

  1. Discuss the big picture of what’s involved in self-hosting and help fill in gaps in my understanding;
  2. Help me decide on the best initial setup for my needs and skill level;
  3. Hold my hand during the setup phase and make sure I’m not doing anything stupid;
  4. Ideally be available long term for the occassional question.

I’m willing to pay a fair hourly rate for this assistance. If someone in this community is interested, please dm me. You might want to use a throw away for that too, assuming this work can’t be done anonymously.

Alternatively, any suggestions for good websites to find a consultant, and what skills I should be looking for, would also be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading. Wishing you all the best for 2026.

Edit: I appreciate all the offers for free help on this forum.

I perhaps didn’t explain well enough that what I really need is a knowledgeable coach, who can get me moving and provide guidance. I bought the Official Pi-hole Raspberry Pi 4 Kit a few months ago and it’s still sitting on my desk gathering dust. Embarrassing but true.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    10 hours ago

    For pihole you don’t need support from router. It’s convenient if you can adjust dhcp-server settings so that pihole will automatically cover your whole network, but it’s not a requirement, you can just manually set each device to use pihole as DNS server. All you need is a static IP address outside your DHCP -pool. For spesific router configurations, you can ask those too, just include spesific model and possibly screenshots from your router interface.

    That iMac of yours is more than enough to get you going. If you plan to run multiple things on it it might be good idea to look for hypervisors like proxmox or ovirt, but basic qemu+libvirt -setup on pretty much any linux-installation will work just fine too.

    For the 3rd part, your concerns are mostly about networking and setting up pihole/other servers on your local network will gain you knowledge on how to manage that as well. Also, you can set up nextcloud/immich/whatever locally at first, get familiar with them and then allow access from the internet either via bitwarden or other tunneling or directly over public network. Latter has obviously way bigger threat models than using VPN and accessing stuff that way, but gladly the networking side of things is somewhat it’s own beast from the servers so you can build everything local only at first and then figure out what’s the best approach for you with remote access.

    • TA_Help@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      5 hours ago

      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.

      • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Even if your router acts as an DNS proxy it shouldn’t overload any pihole installation unless you have a crapload of devices doing millions of queries per hour. My pihole manages all my devices (20-30 individual things) without any problems and even if I hit some rate limit it’s going to be a change to default configuration, not a immovable object on your way. Based on quick glance over that reddit thread a new router might be a good option, but that’s another easy-ish task to accomplish. I use mikrotik device and I’m pretty happy with it but there’s a ton of good options.

        For hiring someone to coach you I can see quite a few of potential issues. People who claim to know what they’re talking about but don’t really have the knowledge, straight up scammers obviously, mismatch in personal chemistry which will make learning unnecessarily difficult or even impossible, some people just aren’t good at teaching even if they do know their stuff and so on. By all means, use your money however you like, but I personally strongly advice against it unless you can get some courses on (preferably local) reputable vendor. You can look for online courses too, cisco has a ton of courses on networking, redhat has plenty of linux courses and other big players have their own training and even certificates if you want to go that far.