I basically do exactly this, but I am running the reverse proxy on my home computer: the VPS is literally just acting as a proxy, for which I use wireguard to tunnel the connection. So far it’s worked great, though initial setup was a pain.

I had My minecraft server scanned by at least 3 different bots, and I even had some friendly guy join my server that apparently found it using a bot he wrote. I’m now using a whitelist lol. One of the account names that scanned my server was "Fifth Column, which is a griefing group.

With how easy it is to Massgrave to get a valid Windows key, I personally don’t even consider backing up windows keys lol.

I think it’s probably down to preference. I personally really like Fedora server because it comes pre-installed with the Cockpit webui which replaces the role of Portainer and makes other admin tasks like firewall openings and user management trivial. I’m definetly glad to have switched away from Ubuntu server which I was using before.

Hugo is also pretty cool.

Filestash looks awesome! I tried the demo on my phone and it was way snappier than Nextcloud or even Google drive lol. I mostly use Nextcloud for documents and for calender and contacts, so I might replace nextcloud soon given how slow it usually is.

AMD processors also have worse video encoding compared to Intel, which matters for Jellyfin.

Just btw, your requirements for the website would work just fine on a static site. A static site just means the server only serves the website and nothing else. No DBs or anything like that.

I switched over to Zoho as well recently. While there are some upsells, they are usually reasonable enough. I also occasionally use their other services like writer, notes, and calendar which is nice.

But also, there are significant potential savings and advantages for data storage at home.

The learning aspect is the big one for me. If you need a reliable service with no time spent learning or troubleshooting, you’re probably better using a paid service.

Bitwarden does exactly that. It will mostly work with no server connection.

This is exactly what I do. I find Portainer to be nice for getting an overview of my containers that are all created using docker-compose.

Discord is also quite the resource hog. Trying to run the web version on weaker phones is a slog.

Depending on the use, you may be able to spin then down when not in use, but that’s not always possible for some applications.

I know for me personally, its worth the time to set things up myself since I usually learn something new along the way. If you don’t care about the learning aspect and just want the finished product, paying someone else is probably a good idea.

I bought a small APC UPS about a year ago and am glad I did. In my area, very brief outages are somewhat common so a small UPS will work for the majority of outages.

A download manager I found to work well generally was aria2c. Only really worth it if you are on linux but it is simple yet powerful.