I’d recommend starting by hosting a nextcloud instance.

1. Get a desktop computer, pretty much anything will do but having room to add more HDD is important.
2. Install Linux distro like Ubuntu or something
3. Get a static IP so your IP doesn’t change
4. Setup a router port forwarding rule so that an outside address points to your nextcloud instance.

Then do some optional steps:

• Automatically turn on PC when power comes back on (BIOS setting)
• Startup script that runs nextcloud on startup
• Install docker to manage services like nextcloud
• Add some remote desktop thingy to manage your server from your laptop (ssh is also good but a steeper learning curve)
• Get a NAS for storing data with redundancy.
• Have some other form of backup like your current Google account, cloud provider or one of your mates with a similar setup.

That’s pretty much what you need to start hosting your own files, then later on you can setup a email server, media server like Jellyfin, homepage and everything.

Just go one step at a time and when you hit an issue you can and should ask Google or ChatGPT. Remember, everything exposed to the Internet is vulnerable so take security seriously. Always have everything protected by a decently long password, pairing requirement with your server confirming adding a device or an API key.