I am a sysadmin with over 30 years of experience managing servers and networks for businesses of all sizes as well as for myself, friends, and family.

The FUTO guide is extremely detailed, accurate, and accessible. If does not always follow best practices, and it’s not a comprehensive guide to all of the possibilities for self-hosting. It’s not trying to be. It is a guide for someone with no technical expertise (but with basic technical ability) to degoogle/deapple themselves at a reasonable level of cost and effort.

You do not have to do everything in the list, you can pick and choose the parts you’re interested in. That said, I would recommend reading through the whole article as you have time, because it does a very good job of explaining the concepts involved in building a self-hosted setup, and understanding how everything works is the biggest step toward being able to effectively troubleshoot problems when they inevitably crop up.

If you have specific questions about things that aren’t answered in the guide or via a quick web search, post them here.