Self-Hosting like it's 2025

I love the idea of self-hosting, especially since I keep a number of very tiny websites/projects going at any given time, so resources would not really be too much of an issue for me.

What stops me is security. I simply do not know enough about securing a self-hosted site on real hardware in my home and despite actively continuing to learn, it seems like the more I learn about it, the more questions I have. My identity is fairly public at this point, so if I say the wrong thing to the wrong person on HN or whatever, do I need to worry about someone much smarter than me setting up camp on my home network and ruining my life? That may sound really stupid to many of you, but this is the type of anxiety that stops the under-informed from trying stuff like this and turning to services like Akamai/Linode or DO that make things fairly painless in terms of setup, monitoring and protection.

That said, I'm 110% open to reading/watching any resources people have that help teach newbies how to protect their assets when self-hosting.

I agree - I always wonder should I go overkill and put everything in its own VM for separation? Is it ok to just use containers?

If using Podman, should I use rootless containers (which IMO suck because you can't do macvlan so the container won't easily get its own IP on my home network)? Is it ok to just use rootful Podman with an idmapped user running without root privileges inside the container and drop all unneccessary capabilities? Should I set up another POSIX user before, such that breaking out of the container would in the end just yield access to an otherwise unused UID on the host?

If using systemd-nspawn, do all the above concerns about rootful / rootless hold? Is it a problem that one needs to run systemd-nspawn itself with root? The manpage itself mentions "Like all other systemd-nspawn features, this is not a security feature and provides protection against accidental destructive operations only.", so should I trust nspawn in general?

Or am I just being paranoid and everything should just be running YOLO-style with UID 1000 without any separation?

All of this makes me quite wary about running my paperless-ngx instance with all my important data next to my Vaultwarden with all of my passwords next to any Torrent clients or anything else with unencrypted open ports on the internet. Also keeping everything updated seems to be a full time job by itself.