I’m going to go against the grain and say use K8s from the beginning, or maybe more broadly gitops. I now use a mix of nuc and pi with Talos Linux and deploy with argocd. My entire stack is run from git repos. For me thats really easy and makes running my lab and selfhosted parts a lot less work.

Though the learning experience going from vm management to docker, to compose, to K8s, to gitops has been valuable.

I have 2 registered tlds in .dev and .net. I split their use using .net for personal/selfhosted sites and .dev for public facing.

Loki to Grafana.