Sorry, maybe a weird question. But I am gonna acquire a nice server soon and am interested on how to manage that. I want to run stuff like a webserver, matrix server and just a lot of cool stuff. But how do I approach that on a software level? Any tips would be nice. Thanks
Check out Proxmox hypervisor. Currently running it on an Epyc server I peiced together. Running a dozen or so VMs and a multitude of lxc containers. PfSense routers, docker stacks (I prefer portainer to manage these), Home Assistant, proxy manager, dns server, cloudflare tunnels and game servers, Proxmox easily manages it all. At a cost of $0, its worth checking out.
I also run Proxmox but I added Terraform, Ansible, and Gitea Actions so I can automate the updates and deployment of all my VMs.