Free practical guides

Practical guides for small business websites and home technology.

Free guides for planning, improving and maintaining small business websites, home servers, Home Assistant, local networks and self-hosted services.

Start here

Choose a topic area.

Each guide is written for practical use. The goal is to help you understand your options and choose the next sensible step before making unnecessary changes.

Small Business Websites & WordPress

WordPress, service pages, mobile layouts, trust signals, contact routes, basic SEO and practical websites for small businesses.

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Home Server & Self-hosting

Docker, Portainer, Pi-hole, AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager, Tailscale, Jellyfin, Plex and small self-hosted systems.

View home server guides

Home Assistant

Dashboards, automations, sensors, local control, backups and practical smart-home reliability.

View Home Assistant guides

Local Network & DNS

Local DNS, home-network structure, routers, Pi-hole, AdGuard, local domains and network troubleshooting.

View network guides

Backups & Maintenance

Backup planning, update preparation, documentation, maintenance routines and reducing the risk of avoidable failures.

View backup guides

Setup Planning

Practical planning for home technology, smart homes and small websites before investing more time or changing more things.

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How to use these guides

Use free guides to understand the basics.

The guides are useful when you want to understand a topic, plan a clearer website or technical setup, or avoid common mistakes before making changes.

Good for

Learning the practical basics
Planning a website or technical setup
Checking your own assumptions
Preparing for a defined paid service

Not a replacement for

A project-specific website plan
A setup-specific technical review
Emergency troubleshooting
Security incident support

Example report

Want to see what a written setup check looks like?

Free guides help with general planning. For a closer look at setup-specific written advice, you can view a fictional example Home Server Setup Check report.

The report demonstrates the structure, tone and practical level of detail used in a typical written review. It does not contain real customer data.

View example report View Home Server Setup Check

Featured practical guides

Useful starting points from the OTTA guide library.

Need a simple website or a clearer technical plan?

Start with the free guides, then choose the service that matches what you want to build, review or improve.

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