Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.
The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.
Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.
I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker