That isn’t what normalized means in the context of databases.

Also databases store the same data many times over often. For redundancy and load-balancing purposes. Really, federation just takes care of replication somewhat.

Caddy Reverse Proxy with Basic Auth for services which are critical like my 3d printer. Without auth for other services like my website or jellyfin and such. I use docker for everything so that’s another layer of safety for me.

I have port 443 open and use subdomains for most stuff. Some other ports for non-HTTP services but I don’t have any right now.

Yeah that’s what I have too. One of my servers is exposed with key auth and I just tunnel to other servers from there. A few MB egress is nothing compared with the amount of spam my webserver needs to deal with