It sounds like he wants everything done server side like they did in the mid 90’s. It’s certainly possible, but it won’t result in a very good user experience. The whole page would have to reload to change anything on it.

Just make sure the VPS will shut down if the bandwidth is exceeded rather than giving you a big overage charge.

If your ISP provides IPv6, set that up. Everything will have a globally routed address, so your domains will work from your LAN and the internet. If you don’t have IPv6 available, get a free tunnel from Hurricane Electric.

NAT works fine until you get stuck on CGNAT and can’t host anything on IPv4 without using a VPN.

The benefit is being able to easily access devices from the internet. The same address works on the LAN and WAN. There’s no port forwarding, so multiple devices can have the same port open. You also don’t need to mess with a VPN if your IPv4 connection uses CGNAT.

It’s getting harder to find routers that will run open source firmware. The best option is to run OPNsense or pfSense on a low power x86 machine and use separate APs for WiFi.

The load on my UPS is around 100-140 watts. That includes my server, firewall, switch, starlink and a unifi access point. I would love to get that power consumption down. I only get 4-5 hours of runtime on battery. Also, the room it’s in is small and it gets really hot in the summer time.

The problem is the average person is not going to know how to properly secure whatever they are hosting.

This is worse than a streaming service dropping a show. They are removing the ability to play digital files that people purchased.

It’s very easy to setup a Hurricane Electric tunnel and you get an entire /48 for free. The only downside is that it doesn’t work over CGNAT.

It looks like IPv6rs is using WireGuard, so it can work even with CGNAT. I didn’t see any mention of what size allocation they hand out though.

At that price, the hardware will be ancient and you will spend more on electricity in a year than you spent on the server.

I certainly wouldn’t want pay the power bill from leaving a bunch of these running 24/7, but would work fine if you wanted to learn cluster computing.

You could always load them up with a bunch of classic games and get all your friends over for a LAN party.

My IPv4 connection uses CGNAT, so I use a VPN to access my server. I also have IPv6, so I have a couple of things directly accessible over it in case the VPN drops for some reason. I do have dynamic DNS set up, although it’s not really necessary. My IPv6 prefix doesn’t seem to change unless I change the DUID on my firewall.

Whatever one has a data center closest to you. If the VPS is on the other side of the country, the ping time will be very high.

I’ve had a USB drive connected to my server for years with no issues other than being slow. It’s a 5400 rpm 2.5" drive connected over USB2.

I get about 10-15mbps down from my VPS using a single TCP stream. I get over 200mbps using UDP, it pretty much maxes out my internet connection. The VPS is over 1100 miles away, so there quite a bit of latency.

I use rsync and SFTP to transfer files to a remote server and NFS over the LAN.

I have HTTPS and SSH accessible on the internet but only over IPv6. Anything else I access over an SSH tunnel or VPN.

Do any of those cheap Chinese computers ever get any firmware or bios updates?

You could connect an ESP32 to the power and reset switches through opto-isolators or relays. You will have to do a little bit of programming, but you can host a website on the ESP32 that will allow you to operate the switches remotely.

If you want to get a bit fancier, you could connect the UART on the ESP32 to a serial port on the server through a TTL to RS-232 level converter and have a remote serial terminal embedded in the web page too. That won’t do much good if the server is completely locked up though.