Do you want something that also has CDN like Cloudflare? Bunny.net is good, but way more expensive than a cheap VPS if you use a lot of traffic.

Plain text or org mode file.

Flac for me has been about half the size of wav, at least for normal 16 bit 44 khz audio. Maybe it’s worse at higher bit depth? Anyway bulk storage is pretty cheap. You could have Flac in your archive while keeping ogg or whatever on your everyday playback device.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_server

Leopards ate my face.

They are generally used for speech recognition and image classification, sometimes in a BAD way, like face recognition in surveillance cameras.

You could ask on lowendspirit.com for other cheap storage. Yeah Storage Box is mostly raw storage with RAID-6 but no automatic replication or backup. The somewhat.more expensive Storage Cloud product is backed up nightly.

Two locations in Germany and maybe one in Finland iirc. Check their website to be sure. None outside Europe for now.

I’m pretty happy with Hetzner Storage Box at around 2 euro/month/TB with no bandwidth fees.

If you want a fancy multi-user site, the source code for archiveofourown.org is on github or gitlab (idr which). But for a small single user site I’d just go static. You could go full nerdy and write in texinfo then run an html converter. Texinfo is actually for computer manuals so it has chapters, sections, cross references, indexes, link navigation between pages, the whole bit. It is a markup language which I think is better than a wysiwyg formatter for documents that will be read in more than one way. I think there is a way to make epubs from texinfo docs.

In a sort of similar spirit there is Org mode (org-mode.org) but you have to be or become an Emacs zealot to use it.

Look also at pandoc.org which converts between lots of formats.

I use it and I like it, but other people have their own favorites. The online docs are fine.

25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.

i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn’t that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don’t think I’d bother with a room full of crufty old PC’s if I was pursuing something like that.

Tbh I sometimes sshfs mount a vps onto a home machine but doing it the other way around doesn’t seem worthwhile. The idea of a vps is that it’s in a data center, has tons of bandwidth, backup power, you can set up a failover scheme if you need high availability, etc. Stuff like media is on your home server so you can use it locally, and maybe it’s backed up remotely just in case, but doesn’t need to be live mounted. That said, I’m used to home internet being unreliable compared to VPS, so mounting it to a vps sounds flaky.

If you want more storage on your vps, just get a bigger one, I would say. Or if you want tons of remote storage, get something with better connectivity.

Do you have particularly cheap or free electricity?

mxroute.com

Maybe I’m missing something but how is the host ip known? The server has a maybe-known range of addresses, but I don’t announce which address has an sshd listening. There are 2**64 addresses in the range, so scanning in 1 second doesn’t sound feasible.

Imagine that the xz exploit actually made it into your server, so your sshd was vulnerable. Having it on another port does seem helpful then. In fact i sometimes think of putting mine on a random secret address in the middle of a /64 ipv6 range, but I haven’t done that yet.

it occurs to me, the xz exploit and similar is a good reason not to run the latest software. It affected Debian Sid but not the stable releases. I’m glad I only run the stable ones.

org-mode.org ?

Deliverability is hard no matter what software you use. You have to spend a while warming your IP addresses. This is one thing I’d call a hassle to self host. I’ve been using mxroute.com which is diy friendly and cheap.

How many are you talking about? 100s? 1000s? Is it really different from books or CDs? Anyway the ones you have worked through are what matters. Data hoarding is fun but it’s not that much different from random bits on your hdd.