Selfhosted

Thanks for asking this question. These replies are so much more helpful in understanding the basic premise than anything I've come across.

You can think of Docker as something that lets you run all of your self-hosted services inside of their own virtual machine. To each service, it looks like that service is running on its own separate computer. (A Docker container is not actually a virtual machine, it's something much faster than that, but I like to think about it the same way. It has similar advantages.)

This has a few advantages. For example, if there is a security vulnerability in one of your services, it's less likely to affect your whole server if that vulnerable service is inside of a Docker container. Even if the vulnerability lets an attacker see files on your system, the only "system" they can see is the one inside of the Docker container. They can't look at anything else on the rest of your actual computer, they can only see the Docker "virtual machine" that you created for that one service.

Now compare Docker vs LXC vs Chroot vs Jails and the performance and security differences. I feel a lot of people here are biased without knowing the differences (pros and cons).

I would start with a premade docker compose file. From there learn how to tweak it.

Wow! Thank you all for the civilized responses. This all sounds so great. I am older and I feel like I've already seen enough ads for one lifetime and I hate all this fascist tracking crap.

But how does that work? Is it just a network on which you store your stuff in a way that you can download it anywhere or can it do more? I mean, to me that's just a home network. Hosting sounds like it's designed for other people to access. Can I put my website on there? If so, how do I go about registering my domain each year. I'm not computer illiterate but this sounds kind of beyond my skill level. I'll go search Jellyfin, weird name, and see what I can find. Thanks again!

Thank you for the thorough response. After looking carefully at what you wrote I didn't really see a difference between the term self-hosting and home network.

You said you have software that automatically downloads media. The way I see this using movies for instance, if I own the movies and have them on my machine, then I can stream them over my network and have full control. Whereas if I "own" them on Amazon and steam it from there, they can track the viewing experience, push ads, or even remove the content completely. I understand that.. But if I want a NEW movie, I'm back to Amazon to get it in the first place (or Netflix, or Walmart, etc. I get it). I'm fact, personally I've started actually buying disks of the movies/music I like most so that it can't really be taken away and I can enjoy it even without an Internet connection. Am I missing something? Unless of course the media you are downloading is pirated.

I know I'm asking what seems to be a huge question but I'm really only asking for a broad description, sort of an ELI5 thing.