Find out if there are any corporate off-lease machines being sold in your area. USFF machines are frequently used as mini desktops or point of sale computers then sold off for peanuts when warranties are done. Especially look at i3-8xxx generation, as they don’t support windows 11 fully.

Thanks, I like it. The downside is that the VPS can see the content of my services, so it’s no good if you don’t trust the VPS provider, or if the content is too sensitive to allow that. I think it’s a good trade-off for my usage though. Performs well. One of the services I proxy is a rpi serving images downloaded from weather satellites. Connecting directly to the pi is super slow, but the proxy caching makes it 100% faster.

I use a $2 VPS in Quebec that proxies my home stuff over Tailscale. It uses Caddy and does the TLS encryption and caching. It has the providers DDOS protection, plus I have configured the firewall to have some further protection.

It could also just directly forward TLS packets over any sort of VPN if you didn’t trust the VPS provider or wanted to reduce cpu load.

The VPS is a $2 instance and very under powered, however it has a dedicated static IP and some Ddos protection. The basement computer is powerfully and capable of providing various services, but I don’t want any trouble with my home IP address. Tailscale let’s the VPS see the home computer securely.

I use both. Caddy on a VPS that reaches into my Tailscale network and proxies services hosted on a computer in my basement.

Either DMZ on the first router, or bridge mode on the second.

Your opinion is a hard-learned lesson here. I only recently figured that out. The Nextcloud “app store” is just too tempting.

I use both as well. They server different purposes. When my wife wants to take a quick scan of a paper document and archive it instantly, or have pictures auto-upload, or open and edit a document we worked on a year ago, all on her IPhone, the Nextcloud client works great and really has no competition in the iOS world. When I want to keep the files in my home directory, including some big, regularly changing files, instantly synced between computers and hosted VMs, Syncthing is amazing. I also add Syncthing shares as an external source in Nextcloud, so I can open those files via the web. As others have said, Nextcloud works fine, provided you don’t start installing all sorts of “apps” you don’t need -stick to the basics.

Yes, that’s how I use it. It has access to a read only bind mount of my photo directory. The ML doesn’t write exif data to the images, just keeps that in its database.

I see you have a bunch of good answers now, so I’ll ask; if you are comfortable self hosting, why not consider a VPS? Yes it can be a little bit of maintenance, but it’s very minimal and you get far more flexibility and the ability to further develop those selfhosting chops.

I use sendgrid as my outgoing smtp relay to avoid ip reputation issues you mention. You still have to configure your dns settings for spf and dkim pointing at their servers instead of yours. Their free tier is 10x the email I’ll ever send so it doesn’t cost anything. There are a few companies in this space with free tiers. It works, but it isnt Gmail level deliverability. I still get spam binned occasionally.

This is signal detection theory combined with an arms race that keeps the problem hard. You cannot block scrapers without blocking people, and you cannot inconvenience bots without also inconveniencing readers. You might figure something clever out temporarily, but eventually this truism will resurface. Excuse me while I solve a few more captchas.

This is the only question that really matters. If it’s overpriced? meh, it’s a cheap alternative to a NUC. But if it’s going to be stuck on obsolete software forever, run.

I used stunnel years ago to tunnel both openVPN and SSH traffic and it worked flawlessly. Looks just like https web traffic to dpi software. Beware though, that long open connections can also set off flags, so don’t keep connection’s open permanently.

That 600mbps is the throughput of the encryption on those devices. It’s no different crossing networks, but the speed will be limited by the network speed. The benefit of a p2p vpn is that you don’t need to shut it off when you join the same network. The devices remain accessible at the same ip whether they are on the same network, or if one is somewhere else. The overhead is negligible and you gain the security isolation that would normally require subnets and a firewall.

In the end, yes, I can stream HD video just fine from another network. For most people, the limitation will be their home ISP’s uplink speed.

It’s going to depend on the devices involved, but I get about 600 megabit or so between two computers over tailscale on my network (really, wireguard). That’s what, 10 HD video streams? Of course, it’s going to depend on device cpu capability and network bandwidth.

Car batteries are cheap storage if you very rarely discharge them. You get many years if you are only using the top 80% or so of their voltage range, but if you discharge them to 50%, you only get a few hundred cycles, and if you discharge to 0%, you get dozens, if that. “Deep cycle” batteries have the same characteristic, but tend to give you more amp-ours before you hit those thresholds.

Good Lifepo4 batteries could last up to 10 years with daily full discharges. They are quite amazing in that respect. They are also likely safer than even lead acid -which need to be vented properly to avoid hydrogen gas buildup. They don’t get thermal runaway like lipos, but the cells are very much capable of producing enough current for electrical fires, so you want ones that are built properly. Maintenance is pretty much just “don’t ever charge it if it’s frozen.”

DIY, all DC is often the way to go if you are trying to run for a long period of time. UPSs are really typically designed to run just long enough ride out brown-outs or to shut everything down safely in a total blackout. Some even shut down if they don’t sense a heavy enough load (i.e., designed to assume servers have shut down, and so preserves the battery -I banged my head against that for so long!).

I have everything on a consumer-grade APC now, and I have it set up to give me about 3 minutes of server, + another half hour of basic networking. I do have some marine deep cycles and an inverter, so I could set up the networking to run longer if cell towers were down and I needed it. But I’d likely use the energy for other things.

I like this approach, but I’m currently sitting in a foreign hotel who’s wifi seems to block WG. Annoying. Keep a TLS-protected reverse proxy for things you might need through obscure networks.