I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.

As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.

I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).

Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web services, even as a newcomer (all without draining my pockets too much)?

Edit: I was working on a lot of misconceptions and still have a lot of learn. Thank you all for your answers.

I am working on a simple static website that gives visitors basic information about myself and the work I do. I want this as a way use to introduce myself to potential clients, collaborators, etc., rather than rely solely on LinkedIn as my visiting card.

This may seem sound rather oxymoronic given that I am literally going to be placing (some relevant) details about myself and my work on the internet, but I want to limit the websites' access from bots, web scraping and content collection for LLMs.

Is the a realistic expectation?

Also, any suggestions on privacy respecting, yet inexpensive domains that I can purchase in Europe would be of super great help.

I am a teacher and I have a LOT of different literature material that I wish to study, and play around with.

I wish to have a self-hosted and reasonably smart LLM into which I can feed all the textual material I have generated over the years. I would be interested to see if this model can answer some of my subjective course questions that I have set over my exams, or write small paragraphs about the topic I teach.

In terms of hardware, I have an old Lenovo laptop with an NVIDIA graphics card.

P.S: I am not technically very experienced. I run Linux and can do very basic stuff. Never self hosted anything other than LibreTranslate and a pihole!

I am a teacher and have students who speak many different languages. The most common ones are Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, but we have other folks speaking other languages as well.

I wish to translate all my notes, lecture subtitles, and topic-exercise documents to other languages. Moreover every year, I have to update my teaching material and include new stuff. So, muddling though everything manually is not much of an option as it might take up to two months just for this task.

Are there nice self hosted and libre/open source solutions out there for this task?

I am somewhat late into the Linux-verse (three years in now) and want to move into self-hosting to do two things:

1. Host my own Jitsi server and sessions. (or any other open source solution)

2. Host my own solution to privately and securely share photographs of my kids and life here with my family abroad.

At some point, I want to host my own little static-website about myself which should “replace” having to give people a LinkedIn account or something.

The thing is, I know nothing about owning domains, etc. I have never done this before. I have been lurking around this forum to learn some of the basics, but would really like a more tailored reply (is possible). I am working in Europe.

1. Which computer should I use? I want to host everything on my computer at home. I don’t want to go the VPS route.

2. Where can I buy an inexpensive domain(s)? I assume I only need one.

3. What other things do I need to consider? My current broadband is IPv4 only.