Craft computing did several videos on YouTube for “cloud gaming” servers. Maybe check that out.

Yup I felt the same way didn’t end up using it.

How do you deal with outages on the local mail server VM do you queue mail?

What about sending mail as I know outbound smtp can be difficult to avoid getting spammed

In regards to the VPN of its pushing all traffic over the VPN you can add your own routes to keep some traffic local.