While I appreciate the work of the devs and whilst I strongly support the idea of selfhosting your own data to gain a high level of data sovereignity, I’m missing a disclaimer here to inform new users who’d like to give this a try about possible risks coming along with running your own (selfmanaged) server. The documentation right now gives the impression that you only have to follow the mentioned steps with entering a few commands in your terminal to benefit from a working and stable cloud instance. It is mentioned though that some Linux admin knowledge is required but this is very vague and does not inform in a way where a possible user can make up his own opinion if he would like to take the risks or not.
If you’ve never set up a server before in your entire life then I strongly discourage you to start learning by setting up an instance which will be publically accessible on the internet. A better approach would be to set up a server in your network at home and learn basic securing and hardening techniques in an environment which will not negatively affect you and your data if you make any mistakes.
In the EU, if you rent a VPS or Root Server, it’s you who is legally responsible for any malicious or illegal activities that are happening on your server. And if you do not know how to secure your server sufficiently against hackers then it’s an easy job for an attacker to gain access and misuse your data and the server resources while you are full liable. So please, only set up a server on the internet if you actually know what you are doing - I cannnot stress this enough.
Also, when running your own mailserver you should take into account that you could run into problems with sending mails to specific providers. Especially Microsoft is hard to handle here. They use the bad practice of banning whole IP subnets when they detect malicious activities like spam. So if one of your VPS neighbors in the same IP subnet sends spam, Microsoft will also automatically ban you. If you are lucky, mails to domains like @outlook.com or @hotmail.com will get rejected with a notice which will allow you to further take actions. But it also happens that Microsoft blackholes mails and in this scenario your mails will not arrive without you even noticing it. A solution for this would be to use a trusted SMTP-relay for specific recipients.
Please don’t misunderstand these points I mentioned. I’m not saying this with a negative attitude at all - I just want to raise awareness over this.
I would really appreciate it if you guys could update the documentation to further inform users.