The non-noobs also don't have all the skills. The main skill is being able to progress towards a goal even though you don't know how, by searching for others that have done similar things and adapting their instructions.

Some starter goals:

* Get a Raspberry Pi

* Assemble the case for it, format the SD card, start the OS

* Install PiHole & Tailscale

* Setup Tailscale on your phone so that you can use PiHole on the go

* Adjust your router so that most devices go through PiHole

* Get a more powerful router or OpenWRT software for the router so that you can do hairpin NAT to reroute everything to the PiHole.

* Attach a hard drive to your Raspberry Pi...

Or just use whatever old piece of hardware you have laying around, cheap is decent, but free is gold.

First: try running just about anything from https://awesome-selfhosted.net . Pick something useful to you.

I chose Nextcloud and Jellyfin when I started in 2020. Before then I was running a few random things like Syncthing and Samba mostly just for myself. In 2020 I decided to try and apply a more thoughtful, disciplined process. Good security, reliable backups, useful for my whole family, etc.

Shameless self-promotion: https://selfhostbook.com . My book covers justification for self-hosting, fundamental skills, and homelab (or perhaps "homeprod") setup with Ubuntu, Ansible, Docker, and Traefik.

I wrote it for folks with some light sysadmin/programming skills. It's a good general starting starting point for self-hosting.

I started a few months ago. Reddit's /r/homelab has lots of great resources, and you can get some good deals through /r/homelabsales, though the best deals usually go quickly.

Like with learning a programming language, having a specific goal helps a lot.

Reading other people's posts about their hardware, how they use it, and what problems they solved with their homelab can be a source of inspiration that sets you on the right path.

Like others on this thread have said, while it's tempting to immediately dive into racks, patch cables and network diagrams, you can achieve A LOT with something simple like a small NAS or a NUC. Even a spare laptop that you can repurpose might be more than sufficient.

Unless you're trying to simulate managing enterprise hardware (and I mean physically managing it), the greatest value lies in learning the software side of thing, IMHO.