I stared a year ago, from scratch. Fumbled around with a Raspberry for a few months and then bought a mini PC for 100 euros. (Lenovo tiny m73 with 8GB of RAM and a 500 GB ssd) That’s all you need.

Proxmox is a great way to go because it’s quite easy to create and delete virtual machines. You’ll be starting over quite a bit in the beginning.

I recommend documenting your stuff so you can easily start over. Claude.ai has been a great help for me to troubleshoot. AI is awesome to get the typos out of your config files.