You can do both. Sell a license and sell cloud storage.

The price depends on the market. Some people won’t pay out of principle, and some might even think it’s too cheap if you provide enough value.

The only way to truly know is to actually build it and sell it.

Best of luck!

Is there a typo on the HDD prices? Looks super expensive. With that amount you could have 48TB of NVME drives (assuming you have a controller for that many sticks, but you probably could buy one with the leftover from the sticks)

In general you shouldn’t spend more on newer/larger capacity HDDs unless you absolutely need that much storage per slot (that is, you are space constrained), as the prices invariably go down in less than an year. Smaller drives with 12~16TB are a much better TB/$. Check diskprices.com to see current trends.

If you care about speed, relying on HDDs for that is a bad proposition. You are better served by a SSD cache in front of the HDDs. In case of SSD failure, it’s much cheaper/faster to replace that SSD than to rebuild your strained RAID.

As for CPU performance, pretty much any newer Intel QuickSync will handle your needs. If money isn’t an issue, I’d rather go with Intel NUC 12th gen or newer. I have one and it handles anything I throw at it, including the most demanding 4k transcoding. The NUC and a 4-disk Synology uses less than 50w with the disks being used.

If scanning manually doesn’t work, then there’s a larger issue here. Faulty HD perhaps?

Otherwise, this happens to me when Plex is using a folder that is mounted on a file system with no inotify support, such as network shares. You mention you have SMB, but it’s not clear if Plex is using the folder over network or not.

Fastmail and nextdns. I’m still paying for iCloud, but I intend to move everything to my local server.

I go on and off streaming services: Disney, Hulu, Netflix, HBO.

Amazon Prime, which includes a bunch of goodies.

Kindle Unlimited. I usually wait for promotions since there isn’t a ton of material I like that I haven’t read yet. Also I’m rather busy lately.

Any recent PC will do. Naturally, if you plan on playing games on it (moonlight and sunshine) you should size appropriately, and I’d recommend not to mix your NAS with a gaming PC since games and accessory can crash your server.

Without gaming, any 8th generation Intel or newer with iGPU should handle most transcoding needs. It’s more than capable of handling all the services you mentioned (again, not considering gaming)

I’d look into mobile class cpu so it’s lighter on energy consumption.

No mention on orgmode?

There’s nothing really private about your ip. Whatever you need to do to secure your network you have to do in any solution for this problem.

If you had monitoring, you wouldn’t have taken 6 hours to catch it.

I’d say learn HA anyway because it’s a good skill, but that doesn’t prevent you from having the other parts I mentioned. I say this because, again, unless you are experienced with HA, there will be edge cases where it’s not going to do what you though it would do, and your service will be down all the same. Monitoring/alerting and one-click/shell script install will be much more valuable in the short-mid term.

HA involves many factors: service uptime, link uptime, db uptime, etc. I’d probably put a reverse proxy in front and use the servers as upstream. web servers tend to be more reliable, so in your case a single instance ought to suffice.

Aside from actual HA tools, your most important asset in this stage is a uptime check service that pings your server every n seconds, a reliable backup/restore procedure, and a one-button deployment strategy.

Shits can and will probably happen. What are you going to do when it does? And how fast can you respond? I say this because you most likely won’t get HA right in the first, second, or third time, unless you already have tons of experience behind you. Embrace failure and plan accordingly.

Can’t you setup a new array with your new 3 drives, copy the data over, then expand your array with your old drives? IIRC zfs added support for expanding pools last year or so?

If you want to use a cloud provider, then your main problem will be uploading this much data and then downloading it back again, both price and time wise.

An easier solution is in fact copying the data over to another storage. Maybe borrow some pendrives from friends/family?

You can buy a PCIe riser for your NIC. This could be a solution for the GPU taking a lot of space. Naturally you still need a slot on the case to attach the NIC to, but at least you will be able to put it into a PCIe slot.

It’s fine to have high CPU usage when something is actually running. I meant that it’s not normal to have background tasks (open programs that aren’t actively being used) consistently consuming too much CPU. 0~5% would be healthy. Maybe even 10%. Most definitely not 75%+.

It’s not normal for a computer to be using 99% CPU with background tasks only. I’d format and reisntall windows. If that doesn’t work, there’s a chance there’s a rootkit infection. In that case, the laptop is a no-go for anything.

In any case, as others have pointed out, I don’t see a lot of benefit of hanging with this laptop if you already have other computers. Unless you want to retire those devices and use the laptop only?

DO have more managed services, though. So it’s a balance between convenience and raw price. I’d say that for somebody starting solo, DO (and other PaaS) might be worth the premium

Wouldn’t we all be very pleased with 5k daily users? Lol

You will be fine. Any VPS/cloud will work for the database don’t forget your backups. In fact, this is where you should invest a bit more and have a managed database solution, so you can scale up if needed, unless you are very savvy with db administration

I suppose wildcard DNS would not work for you?

I have a *.svr.domain.tld on Google Domains (need to transfer somewhere else), and then on Caddyfile I can register individual foo.svr.domain.tld without touching DNS

I have vscode but on my os and then connect via the remote extension. Works well.

For docker, I’d rather go with VM if you want isolation from one project to another. They are easier to snapshot and easier to reason around for development in my opinion

If you don’t feel slowed down, I wouldn’t change a thing honestly. At most consider cabling your media devices instead of streaming over Wi-Fi.

2.5g works on cat5e for reasonable distance. I’d be surprised if anybody today would have something slower.