I’m already self hosting a media server and have been for 10+ years. have a vpn and all, but it is also accessible outside of my network (usually).
However it’s a very basic setup that I intend to redo to make it substantially more robust and somewhat automated, and I need to learn a ton of stuff to do so which will scaffold for this stuff. I keep hearing the same words, so at least I know what to look into :)
I have a decent list of self hosting software to look into for various things, I just haven’t had time to pursue it, but I’m about to have plenty of time :)