Most people shouldn’t self host. It’s a hobby for people who want to do it, and there are benefits, but spending 3 hours on a weekend fixing stuff is not how most people wish to spend their time. Furthermore, it’s not a good use of most people’s time. We split labor up into specialties, forcing people to do work outside their specialty causes pointless inefficiency. I agree with what other commenters have said in that a better approach would be to have more small businesses hosting federated together, and anyone not inclined to self host should just purchase service through one of those many small providers instead.

As far as I know there is only one SSD model that meets my criteria (Samsung 870 QVO 8TB), and at $520 right now so I’ve decided it’s best to wait. I’d like it to be quieter but not so badly as to spend $1k on it (need two).

How noisy are these? I have a pair of shucked WD drives that should be equivalent to reds, and they’re pretty noisy in my otherwise quiet home office. Given they’re only 8TB, upgrading them to SSDs for full silence is something in considering as soon as the pricing and availability permits.

I don’t know if this would solve your problem, but if you’re gonna run Ethernet to wherever this device is, consider power over Ethernet. Common boards like the raspberry pi and others can be powered over PoE either with an adapter or in some cases directly. And if your switch doesn’t support PoE, an injector can be had for under $20.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Your IP can identify you still, if there are few users connecting from that IP. VPNs reduce the efficacy of IP based tracking because they allow you to connect via many different addresses, and every one of those addresses will have hundreds of thousands of users on a given day. It adds a lot of noise that makes any pattern identification useless.

I’ve gotten good mileage out of just an Ubuntu live image. If the network is working you can install packages via apt like normal, but they include a lot of the basics already.

Out of curiosity, what are some use cases that would fit this criteria? VMs and containers are very capable and it’s much easier to debug a failed VM than a failed piece of hardware.