ProbablePenguin

You'll get better performance from a 7th Gen core i5 box with about 1/10th the power usage, those go for $80 or so usually.

The main downsides of windows for a server are:

• Forced reboots

• More RAM/Storage usage for the OS

• No options for ZFS or similar data protection software, storage spaces provides basic RAID but the performance can be fairly low.

• Needs a license

• Less general availability of self-hosted software, but you can run Docker for Windows as a way around that.

However there are some upsides, it's very easy to set up and manage, SMB shares are super easy, and some backup software like Veeam B&R is windows only.

How do you find Ionos for keeping up to date? My experience with shared web hosts is they'll be on PHP 7.x or something while PHP 8.2 is the current stable version.

3-2-1 is the minimum I follow for anything important.

1 copy is the working data, 1 copy is a full system image stored on a NAS with incremental backups done nightly with Veeam, and 1 copy is on Backblaze B2 with incremental backups done nightly with Restic,

Bitwarden has never been breached AFAIK

Password managers are a HUGE target, and while I'm sure they do everything possible to prevent a breach from actually obtaining peoples passwords, vulnerabilities do happen.

That's why I think self hosted Bitwarden or KeePass with a file are the way to go.

Watchtower itself works great, it doesn't need a GUI for what it does.

But updating containers in general, either manually or automatically, always carries a risk of something breaking due to the new update.

One thing you can do is make sure you're not using :latest tags in your compose files, and instead pin major versions like postgres:13

And of course make sure you have backups going back multiple points in time in case something does break, and test those backups!

Only when I'm installing/removing hardware. Probably like once a year on average.

Most apps will have an account and sync system built in, Firefox for example has one, Google Keep, etc..

This is what I like about plex. No need to open any ports.

You get super limited quality though since it proxies through their servers.

Plex also uses UPnP to automatically open ports on your router, so unless you've disabled that service on your router it's likely you do have ports open.

Backblaze B2 with Cloudflare? Designed for CDN use, and is $6/TB with free data transfer between B2 and CF.