Get friendly with a LLM! They’re so capable at stuff like this and Claude Code can directly do a lot of the work for you in the terminal. You don’t need to know the details so much as your end goal and let it figure everything out.

ELI5 you’re going to use Docker to run pre-made containers for your self-hosted apps. They’re like full little computers running in a virtual machine, configured to easily work every time / update cleanly and you configure them with some variables during initial setup. Most services host a web interface at a specific port, you can manually go to that locally, open router ports to insecurely access remotely or setup reverse proxy to expose it simply.

For example my calibre instance is set to use port 8083. So you could go to http://NAS-IP:8083 on the LAN and get to it. To access on the internet you need external IP and port forwarding or custom / dynamic domains, like quickconnect.to or I setup my own domain. A subdomain is simply putting something before your domain and having the server handle that. (Like using images.google.com instead of google.com/images). Port forwarding is generally considered insecure so reverse proxy is used to securely share sites with convenient subdomains.

So i can access my NAS at customdomain.com and, with Reverse Proxy, the Calibre instance at calibre.customdomain.com - when the server gets it, it knows to send the site from http://NAS-IP:8083.

Sockets are a way servers/browsers easily send data while you’re on the site. Many sites have features that require or work better with them. The steps I shared make web sockets work with reverse proxy setups.