In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I'm trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.
For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn't make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home... Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I'm planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.
My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they're in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it's capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I'm hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That'd be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don't do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn't be that hard to set up, right?
I'm also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I've read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it's clearly the better option, but I'm team Red and would prefer AMD.
Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I've read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.
That's another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I'm not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it's too much.
For additional context, I'm a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I'm not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that's why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don't want to obsess over it. Money isn't much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.
Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)
I'm biased towards TrueNAS scale, because in my experience, it's been really rock solid, running on bare metal. It also allows you to setup things like Nextcloud/Tailscale/ a lot more, in 1 click from their "app store". It's also got all the virtualization bells and whistles. As for ZFS, again, just like everything else, it's been rock solid and setting up a ZFS pool is pretty much done for you when you install TN Scale.
As for remote access, I've always personally done it via a local Wireguard server and can't really compare it to tailscare or whatever cloudflare does... Because I've never used those.
If you need a GPU just for encoding, go on the 2nd hand market and pick up a used Nvidia RTX 2000/3000 card. Intel Arc could also work, but it's a bit quirky afaik...