Basic knowledge that makes selfhosting easier

1. Some networking basics (Firewall, VPN, NAT, DHCP, ARP, VLAN) makes every selfhosters life easier.
   1b. Your ISP router probably sucks, but you might be able to experiment with some static DHCP at least. I’m a fan of the BSD based routers opnsense/pfsense but depending on what router you have you might also be able to run OpenWrt on your existing router.
2. Some management system and filesharing basics (NFS, SMB, SSH, SCP and SFTP).
3. Learning how to set up a backup for your stuff. The hypervisor you choose may or may not have a built in solution.
4. Checking out a few different hypervisors (Proxmox, Incus, KVM/QEMU, etc) and find out which one you wanna dive deeper into.
   4b. Learn how to make a snapshot for easy rollback in said hypervisor ASAP. Being able to undo the last changes that broke a machine is a godsend.
   4c. VM, LXC, Docker and Podman basics (what are they, how do they differ, which one fits my usecase?)

I know Flackbox has a good CCNA (networking) study guide on youtube, but that is way too in depth for a self hosting beginner.
Here’s some introduction to different parts of the network:
Free CCNA 200-301 Course 06-05: IPv4 Addresses
Free CCNA 200-301 Course 23-01: DHCP Introduction
Free CCNA 200-301 Course 12-04: ARP Address Resolution Protocol
Free CCNA 200-301 Course 21-01: VLANs Introduction
Free CCNA 200-301 Course 21-04: Why we have VLANs