I have an old laptop lying around and I have been meaning to self host some stuff on it but never got around to it.
My biggest limitation is that I only have WIFI and I do not control the network. It’s basically your default residential WIFI network.
The only thing I actually need is self-hosted cloud. What can I utilize this laptop for?
Without being able to set a static ip and forward ports you cant host services and point to them with a domain, like driveway-home.com or something.
But I think cloudflare has a service that lets you connect remotely without needing static ip’s (some one else will know the name). If you were to use that then you can use your laptop to host pretty much anything on the Awesome Selfhosted List.
CloudFlared is the application you run on your server, and CloudFlare tunnels are what it connects with. You get the same outcome as a ddns but it functions differently under the hood. You also need a domain name for this I think.
DuckDNS might be a good option to start out with.
I would advise against port forwarding without at least a proper firewall with isolation. It is very very dangerous to expose things to the internet and it will backfire at some point, sometimes without your knowledge.
Back when I first started I used a service called kubesail https://kubesail.com/
Now that I have way more hardware I just use a VPS on Linode to route traffic.