flynnguy

If you are looking for FOSS, I highly recommend joplin. It’s simple but works well. I used it for many years until recently I switched to Obsidian. I dislike that Obsidian isn’t FOSS but I’m using the free tier and the community plugins really make it so much more powerful than Joplin. They both store things in Markdown so I’m not locked down to their ecosystem which I think is a requirement for any note taking app.

I just think as someone new (like the OP), setting up vanilla pihole is a little easier.

Not all I self-host but pihole, plex, & homeassistant are certainly my most used.

1. Use Linux
2. It’s probably not a static-ip and I wouldn’t rely on it as such. I’d use http://www.duckdns.org/ to handle the dynamic IP issue (or something else, https://freedns.afraid.org/ would be another option)
3. I’d look to pihole to start with for DNS. It blocks ads and you can add manual DNS entries. If you need something more complex, you can always migrate to something like unbound but pihole is a good, easy start.
4. Setup https://letsencrypt.org/ You didn’t mention HTTPS/SSL, but you should really set it up. let’s encrypt makes it easy and free