I stopped self-hosting stuff that’s for the family. In case something happens to me, no way my wife is going to keep this stuff running. And the kids are too young. So they would lose everything.

Family stuff goes in managed solutions (like Proton). Personal and public stuff is selfhosted.

Just something to consider.

Hey breh. My setup us bare metal proxmox, a truenas VM and a couple Debian LXCs. Main LXC is running docker just fine with zero issues.

I’d honestly suggest skipping the truenas VM and just managing your disks in proxmox but my setup has been holding steady for about 5 years now.

Definitely don’t have to choose between lxc or docker.

My vote is for Proxmox because you can run all those other options (and many more) INSIDE Proxmox.

IMHO, it really depends on the specific services you want to run. I guess you are most familiar with Docker and everything that you want to run has a first-class-citizen Docker container for it. It also depends on whether the services you want to run are suitable for Internet exposure or not (and how comfortable you are with the convenience tradeoff).

LXC is very different. Although you can run Docker nested within LXC, you gotta be careful because IIRC, there are setups that used to not work so well (maybe it works better now, but Docker nested within LXC on a ZFS file system used to be a problem).

I like that Proxmox + LXC + ZFS means that it’s all ZFS file systems, which gives you a ton of flexibility; if you have VMs and volumes, you need to assign sizes to them, resize if needed, etc.; with ZFS file systems you can set quotas, but changing them is much less fuss. But that would likely require much more effort for you. This is what I use, but I think it’s not for everyone.

I run proxmox, and proxmox manages the zfs pool, there are VMs for important and convenience services, where important only hold things needed for the machine to work (so networking related) and metrics. I also have a desktop VM for the occasional use, and you can install opnsense later if you want an advanced firewall for VLANs and maybe internet too.
the storage is made accessible through virtiofs shares, but setup is quite hacky, and some things don’t like it (like it can’t store any kind of databases) because virtiofs works technically like a network filesystem, and does not support some consistency features (yet?). maybe ceph would be a solution, it is natively supported by proxmox.

if I were to build a new one, I would try out TrueNAS, it’s newer linux based version. I heard that can run VMs too if needed. I suspect that it can be more user friendly, but I haven’t used its web interface yet ever.

I used to run proxmox, but I wasn’t using most of its functions. I now have migrated to a couple of low power Debian machines on zfs with lxc. I use incus and ansible to manage everything, including backups.

Might want to check out unraid.

My setup is TrueNAS SCALE on bare metal with VMs for Proxmox and Jellyfin. I pass an Arc A380 to Jellyfin for transcoding and it works great. I also leverage LXC contains a lot for small services. I keep everything behind a VPN. It’s pretty easy to distribute Wireguard configs and import them on most OSes, but It’s been a mixed bag getting family members to use it though.

I’m a fan of having dedicated network hardware and VLANs on one router. I generally go for Mikrotik. I used to run pfsense on a VM and when the server when down so did everything else, which caused the house to erupt into chaos.

Also if you’re considering new hardware already I really recommend looking into surplus enterprise gear. I run my whole lab on an R730XD. It holds a ton of drives, has an IDRAC (I can’t live without it now), ECC for extra peace of mind during ZFS scrubs, and they hold an insane amount of inexpensive RAM. They’re fairly cheap on eBay or from refurbishment companies. Bring your own drives with warranties though, used drives are a headache. Servers like this can be really noisy though, I keep mine in the basement.

I’ll also suggest a second drive to mirror your boot drive. You can and should back up your configs but a mirror saves headache and down time if the boot ssd fails. Probably even more important if you’re planning on using this pool for VM storage.

Have fun! 😁

Proxmox is not an alternative to any of those other options.

Edit: to be clear you can use Proxmox AND all of those other options.

TrueNAS will remove VMs the next release. It still supports containers directly.

Edit: apparently I misremembered that and its untrue.