For actual hardware: Hetzner. For VPS there are many choices. Digitalocean is cheap and easy, has european data centers, and some decent value add services.
Ferawyn
joined 3 years ago
Hey claude, upgrade my kernel will you? Thanks!
It will be perfectly reliable for a while. You'll grow to rely on it, stop thinking about it. And then one day half your drives will suddenly be gone. You won't know why, you won't know how to fix it. Your raid set will already be broken. Your data will be gone.
Don't plug and play with your data.
"I can't think of any examples of companies that, in real life, enshittified because they were successful."
Microsoft.
Interesting idea, but I feel anyone who wants this already has the tools available.
Personally, I use Syncthing to synchronize a Media folder across my desktops, phones and tablets.
Media/Music contains my active music collection, mostly ogg conversions of the source flac files. I use .m3u/.m3u8 files as good old playlists, saved to the Media/Music root folder with relative paths. This allows players like AIMP on windows to play/edit those playlists, and players like GoneMAD on Android to play them without any kind of active internet connection.
There's also Media/Audiobooks, Media/Comics, Media/Movies, etc... Yes, they're subsets of the full collections on my NAS, but I've never seen that as a disadvantage.
If you want a complete unit with custom hardware and tuned custom software, look at MikroTik. Solid hardware, dependable software, good support, good community.
If you want to build your own, grab any multi-ethernet micropc from aliexpress and install OPNsense. Cheap and flexible. But you'll be on your own once (not if) something fails.
Both of these are essentially pro-level options with lots of headroom to build up to advanced services. I'd stay away from OpenWRT which is essentially just an open source consumer grade wifi router image. You'd be replacing your crappy (but supported) router with the same thing just without support.
One other option I would mention if you like nice centralized web ui's, have a look at Ubiquiti's Unify. If you can afford to go all-in on a Unify router, backbone switch and wifi access points, the combined management is really a step above the competition.