Building or buying a homeserver... Tips?

Stasky · June 12, 2021

Hey everyone. I've been wanting to have a homeserver for a while now, but I really have no idea what kind of software I'd need, nor what the best approach would be to get it set up.

I plan to use the homeserver with Proxmox and for it to do various things:

Cloud Storage (NextCloud)
Password Manager
Pihole
Jellyfin server (for those who don't know, it's like a Plex server). I doubt I'll stream in 4k but curious about what difference would it make in the final price if I were to take transcoding into account. This one will be accessible from outside the network
Some Docker instances, internal websites for use like wikis or Ghostwriter Notes
In the future maybe set up a website or mail server, I'm trying to find new ideas to tinker with so any suggestions are welcome

But I'm completely lost in the hardware side of all of this, so I have various questions:

What kind of hardware should my server have? What are the minimum requirements or the "ideal" setup to be able to comfortably run this, and preferably for it to not use a lot of power consumption since it should be on 24/7
Should I build one myself or should I go with a prebuild like Optiplex or any I could find in LabGopher (I'm from Spain, so EU options for this)?
In terms of security I plan on using a reverse proxy for the services that will be accessible from outside my network (Jellyfin), is there something else I should take into consideration?
What's a reliable way to setup up backups for all of this? Does it increase the cost of the build a lot?
Anything else I'm completely missing and I should know about? Maybe some software or hardware solutions that could help me and I have no clue about their existence?

I graduated from Computer Engineering last year, working as SysAdmin and looking to get into Pentesting in the following year, so I do like to tinker and learn a lot and would use it for that too. Any help is appreciated, thank you all.