I don't use Nextcloud calendars or address books. But I assume they are included in regular backups.
I pay about 50€ for all absolute overkill Hetzner dedicated server (128gb of RAM).
I live in two different flats in different cities because of personal circumstances.
I switched to Emacs over two years ago because I was getting too comfortable in VS Code. If VS Code didn't have the "dodgy" stuff, I would recommend it to everyone without reservation.
Emacs has been a pleasant surprise. The latest versions have introduced Eglot (LSP), EditorConfig and a few other odds and ends that make it very close to being usable with very little configuration. My latest suggestion for getting started is JUST two lines of config, and I think you can scale easily.
I just wish Emacs had started from the outset with more common keybindings- it makes it hard to recommend because you need to make a significant investment. I think it's worthwhile, but still...
However, due to how it's evolving lately, I suspect it might become even easier to get started with time. If they rolled in to base Emacs automatic LSP installation, that would be huge, for instance.
I assume you basically want protection against disasters, but not high uptime.
(E.g. you likely can live with a week of unavailability if after a week you can recover the data.)
The key is about proper backups. For example, my Nextcloud server is running in a datacenter. Every night I replicate the data to a computer running at home. Every week I run a backup to a USB drive that I keep in a third location. Every month I run a backup to a USB drive on the computer I mentioned at home.
So I could lose two locations and still have my data.
There is much written about backup strategies, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-2-1_backup_rule ... Just start with your configuration, think what can go wrong and what would happen, and add redundancy until you are OK with the risks.
What volume of data you are discussing? How many physical nodes? Can you give a complete usage example of what you want to achieve?
In general, there's a steep change in making things distributed properly, and distributed systems are often designed for big and complex situations, so they "can afford" being big and complex too.
Running LanguageTool locally is a bit of a pain, with some manual steps. Plus you have to fetch some data files. You can find around a few projects like this one to make it easier to run LanguageTool.
And yes, as the poster mentioned, LanguageTool keeps some code exclusive to their paid version. There's a bit of a tension because they ask people not to extend OSS LanguageTool with their paid features.
There's also this interesting clone, but it seems abandoned.
You need two drives for the OS, four for data. Hetzner boxes are cheap with 2 drives, cost multiplies if you add any other.
I use LDAP auth, but no SSO or external mounts. Actually, I tested external mounts, but they gave me bad vibes, although they are interesting.
The other thing, I just run a preview generator application, no other plugins.
I was looking at the Proxmox graphs. Now, looking at iostat, r/s measured over 10s hovers between 0 and 0.20, with no visible effect of spamming reload on a Nextcloud URL. If you want me to run any other measurement command, happy to.
I see some CPU and memory usage on my setup... but I don't even see any IO!
Literally, the IO chart for "week (maximum)" on Proxmox for my Nextcloud LXC container is 0, except for two bursts, of 3 hours of less each. (Maybe package updates?)
The PostgreSQL LXC container has some more activity (but not much), but that's backing Nextcloud and four other applications (one being Miniflux, which has much more data churn).
Huh, what?
I see in your link that that image has support for KasmVNC, which is great and you could use to make Emacs work...
But the whole point of VS Code is that it can run in a browser and not use a remote desktop solution- which is always going to be a worse experience than a locally-rendered UI.
I kinda expect someone to package Emacs with a JS terminal, or with a browser-friendly frontend, but I'm always very surprised that this does not exist. (It would be pretty cool to have a Git forge that can spawn an Emacs with my configuration on a browser to edit a repository.)
Eh, my Nextcloud LXC container idles at less than 4.5% CPU usage ("max over the week" from Proxmox). I use PostgreSQL as the backend on a separate LXC container that has some peaks of 9% CPU usage, but is normally at 5% too.
I only have two users, though. But both containers have barely IO activity.
IMHO, it really depends on the specific services you want to run. I guess you are most familiar with Docker and everything that you want to run has a first-class-citizen Docker container for it. It also depends on whether the services you want to run are suitable for Internet exposure or not (and how comfortable you are with the convenience tradeoff).
LXC is very different. Although you can run Docker nested within LXC, you gotta be careful because IIRC, there are setups that used to not work so well (maybe it works better now, but Docker nested within LXC on a ZFS file system used to be a problem).
I like that Proxmox + LXC + ZFS means that it's all ZFS file systems, which gives you a ton of flexibility; if you have VMs and volumes, you need to assign sizes to them, resize if needed, etc.; with ZFS file systems you can set quotas, but changing them is much less fuss. But that would likely require much more effort for you. This is what I use, but I think it's not for everyone.