I'm about 4-5 years from where I started to self host things. I went through a raspberry, minipc and now I built a small rack where I have a custom built PC where I self host things. Is it a pain in the ass to start without anyone teaching you? YES. I spent a lot of time trying, testing, failing and retrying, but it was a nice trip, I learnt a ton of things and a lot of things I'll learn, I'm still definitively not an expert but I'm improving myself.

I tried (more than one time) nextcloud and I've definitively not liked it. I tried filebrowser which is more near to my use case, than I finished choosing a WebDAV instance using apache, it is perfect for my use-case, compatible with my windows job-pc and mounted perfectly from my LineageOS Android phone.

I've LineageOS without microG and any google thing at all; all I need is self hosted and available through a custom domain and/or through a VPN I self host. 90% of my apps are Foss.

My bank app works great without an official Android OS ( I didn't root my phone).

It's all about the amount of time you can invest through it:

• A lot of time: learn about self host, try the available solutions and choose which one fit your use-case
• Some time: find available solutions that don't require you to do anything (like proton drive, private nextcloud instances etc...)
• No time: use Google.

If you need something, I have some free space on my server that you can use (don't trust me or anyone else, use it by thinking).

Don't give up!

I'm using Addy.io for a year and I can't be more happy. Cheap and working

There are bunch of them. I preferred to start configuring those components by reading and trying to understanding how does the various configurations work. Then I took a look at the ricings I liked and started from them. For every piece of ricing, there is a default configuration where you can start to edit.

Neovim was the hardest to understand (and I'm sure I did something wrong or useless), and also for it there are a lot of useful resources on the web, I can't really raccomend one or another, but again, I avoided every video tutorial just because I prefer to read.

Start with one component and start ricing!