The enormous amount of IO, especially the PCIe lanes is definitely the best feature. If I had one I’d set up a sweet server for everything. Tons of pretty powerful cores and all the pcie would make an amazing Proxmox machine.

Use cloudflared and Cloudflare Zero Trust / Access. You tunnel your services to Cloudflare, who then secures them behind a 2FA wall. No traffic ever goes to anyone aside from you.

It’s designed to update, forget how to function, or both, at the most inconvenient times.

Don’t bother with any of them! For $200 you can get a pretty kitted out Lenovo Thinkcentre, Dell Optiplex, or HP Elite/Prodesk that’ll beat the stuffing out of any of them.

And since you’re concerned about size, the Tiny/Mini versions of the office PCs are in fact, tiny. Just 1 liter in volume.

I like Hetzner. Very high price/performance, pretty easy, no complaints.

Digital Ocean or Vultr. They’re more expensive but Digital Ocean is super user friendly and Vultr follows pretty closely behind.