That site is lovely, thank you!

As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.

Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.

I was considering the VPN option, but as you mentioned for game servers that’s not reasonable, and for some of the collaborative tools I’d prefer being able to give people I don’t trust that much access, for instance people at work/university, to work together with them on whatever would be needed.

If I just decided to make the home server a home-only server, that would ease a lot of my worries. I guess I could get a personal one, with sensitive info but only home network access, and just rent a second one? It’s not like they’re that expensive if you’re just doing small-scale things and find a decent provider

It depends on what you’re used to and the programming languages you use. I learned typing on a German QWERTZ keyboard and while that works for languages like Python and Haskell, which are indentation-based, but for languages which use braces like Java, C, Rust, or similar, it can be annoying to have to use altgr+7 or altgr+0 for { and }. Thus I switched to a US ANSI layout, which was nicer for those specific characters, but caused problems when typing local characters like öäüß. After switching to Linux I set up a compose key, letting me press compose + a + " for ä for example, and while that’s a decent patch, that still breaks the typing flow. So now I’m in my ergo keyboard phase and trying to get my own personal layout going, which meets my own needs for needed characters, based on a colemak-dh design.