Well, that’s something. 
Just as long as you’re comfortable with that safety net, and are aware and happy to take on the risks with experimenting. I self-host, and it can be quite nerve-wracking to go ‘off-script’ without some guidance when you have content you care about.
Could you give us some more details about your set up and how you’ve been maintaining your server so far? Maybe that could shed some light on how this happened, and sound familiar to someone else in the community that’s experienced a similar issue. What server and specs do you have? You’ve mentioned you followed the standard install guide, but you were unclear on some of the routine commands, could you have missed an important update to your server, etc?