I recommend a Raspberry Pi or ODroid SBC. I started with Pis many years ago and the knowledge I gained self hosting websites on Pis opened doors for me in my career. I wasn’t even working in IT when I started with Pis, although I had an A+ cert and was trying to get my foot in the door. Now I’m a Network Administrator. I remember showing my current boss a Raspberry Pi for the first time back in 2014. He had never seen one and was very impressed. Obviously there was more to my success than the work I did on Pis, but it definitely helped me expand my capabilities and many of the skills I learned have been put to use in the organization where I am now employed. As far as having a server running in the background 24/7, when it comes to Pis and SBC, we are talking minimal power consumption and zero noise. Unless you are on the tightest of budgets and have to use dumpster-ware, an SBC is going to be your best bet to get started with self hosting in my opinion.

You could use android phones and apps, but I would also recommend checking out raspberri pi’s. They are essentially tiny computers at about the same scale as a phone. Low power usage, quiet, and you can do quite a lot with them!

My main point was that if there’s one subreddit that should of migrated fully to lemmy… it would be them. Practice what you preach. Granted they are probably one of the larger communities here on lemmy.