Selfhosted

I'd start with some basic Linux networking and tools, if you don't have them already.

I don't know if that's the basics everyone knows these days, but... learn how TCP,UDP,ICMP,TLS relate, what a netmask is, what is ARP and MAC addresses. Fire up Wireshark and look around what is happening on your network. Learn some basic commands like ip -br -a and ss (or the older netstat) so you know how to figure out which program is listening where. Learn how to manually resolve a DNS name (dig or host). How tunnel a TCP connection or a webbrowser through ssh (port forwarding, SOCKS proxy). Learn enough of the HTTP protocol so you can manually enter a valid GET request over a simple TCP connection to port 80 with netcat or nc. Or use httpie or curl for the same purpose. You can't host a lot with that knowledge, but it helps to figure out why things are not working.

Hosting a fediverse instance is at the higher end of the scale when it comes to hosting. There tend to be a lot of moving parts as it's complex software.

Host a static site first, just a bunch of plain HTML files.

Then host a Wordpress site.

Then host a fediverse thing.

Understand what a Reverse Proxy is, because you will not escape reading that phrase.

Host things with Docker for now. If you don't start hosting until you understand everything, you won't start for a long time and that is silly.

Use Cloudflare for now, because they handle a lot of security stuff for you that you definitely don't want to screw up. If you don't know what Cloudflare is, read up on CDNs and why they exist. Their Zero Trust Tunnel is the easiest and safest way to go, as long as you don't plan to do anarchy or sedition on it, just talk about your household plants and dogs and what not and you're fine.

I would suggest you start reading up on reverse proxies, like nginx, caddy or traefik. And maybe docker, to containerize your services, so you don't "splatter" stuff all over your filesystem.

Start simple, then work your way up. Construct a static website with HTML. Learn how to navigate folders on a (remote) server, so the Linux commandline. Learn how to install software and where to find the configuration and logfiles. Then install some webserver and make it serve your first website. You can do all of this on your own computer. And after that you can learn how to install other web applications, how to reconfigure your webserver to act as a reverse proxy.

So start with basic webdevelopment first, then do Linux, webservers, and then once you got the basics you can do more advanced apps, containers and all the stuff.

Not sure which book to recommend. But I often recommend https://yunohost.org/ to people who just want to run webservices. It does most of the complicated stuff for you and you just need to click install for software in YunoHost's catalog. You just need to learn a few basic things about the internet, because it's fairly easy to use.

I'd suggest you take a legal course to find out what you're responsible for that people upload to your server in your jurisdiction. Decide from there if you can handle that before you look into the technicalities of it first.

I would suggest starting out with nginx and just setting up a basic homepage for yourself. Even if it's just a title and background... doesn't matter.

This way you have to solve problems like how to reach your page from the outside (your own domain? DDNS? etc) and also how to set up Certbot for HTTPS (which a lot of services will also require later). That already includes setting up kind of parallel configurations (one for http that than redirects to https, one for https) in nginx. And you will do both later again, because you use the same dual setups to serve two different websites on the same IP depending on which the addressname a visitor entered and also will redirect some of them (or sublocations of your page) to other services that provide a webinterface as a reverse proxy.

https://linuxupskillchallenge.org/

In addition to just making a site available, you also need to learn how to make it secure. Anything published to the Internet will be under constant attack from bots. You need to not only secure the server itself, but also isolate it from the rest of your network in case it does get compromised.

A website is just a html page that lives on some computer somewhere and is being served by a program which tells the computer which html page to show when given a port + path to follow.

All internet connected computers have IP addresses that we can use and DNS is the phonebook that connects IP addresses to domain names. (To test this, ping google.com in terminal, then copy and paste the IP address ping shows you into your address bar).

The webserver/reverse proxy in this case is our program which tells your machine what to send and when: these are programs like traefik, caddy, Apache, nginx et al. On top of this, it doesn't have to be just HTML files, it can be actual files, or services or programs you've written.

External computer: "I want the contents of 10.11.12.13:443/some/path"

[DNS Machinery and Tubes]

Hosting machine: "Someone wants the contents of port 443 and some/path. Found the contents, let me send these back to them"

[Internet machinery and tubes]

External computer: "I have received the contents"

As an aside, if you're behind Carrier-Grade NAT (aka, you can't actually reach your machine from your external IP address because you actually share it with a bunch other people) then you can use a VPN like tailscale (or headscale) to have a tunnel connection between the machines you require to interact/

Look at nginx or Apache if you want to host multiple websites on a single machine (that is how they have done it since the 1990s) containers make things easier if dealing with multiple complex sites but are not absolutely required.

So going back to the title, what to study? Maybe some specific book? Private classes/courses?

Networking. If you want to understand the reasoning behind things this is where you start. A good foundation in tcp/ip, the 7 layer network stack, as well as basic network protocols (dns, dhcp, http, etc.) will go a long way toward helping you troubleshoot when things go wrong.

Maybe throw in some operating systems study as well for when you start to use docker.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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