More people should try to self host things again. Seems that people are forgetting how things work and instead use services that does it for them at some cost.
Self hosting is rarely complicated. It's also easy to achieve better performance and lower cost in many situations.
For someone who knows nothing about self-hosting, where should I start? I'm a self-taught junior dev but haven't had a chance to dabble with any aspect of deployment yet... willing to learn though.
Setting up your own DNS like pihole and a personal vpn to enable you into your home network when outside is usually a good starting point. Or even simpler and potentially useful setup your own gitea instance, it's easy just use the sqlite backend.
Set up a basic web server, then try something like WordPress/Drupal (with some database backing it)... then maybe SMTP/IMAP with spam/av filtering and a web frontend (roundcube/squirrelmail)... that will probably keep you busy for a few months :)
Self hosting is rarely complicated. It's also easy to achieve better performance and lower cost in many situations.