If you have docker containers and other stuff all on that USB drive I’d really reccomend getting it all off that USB (not just logging) and onto a proper drive of some kind. USB thumb sticks are not reliable long term storage, you will wake up to find the drive failing one day and good chance you lose everything on it with little to no warning.
In very basic terms, and why you want to do them:
Attack surface is the ports and services you are exposing to the internet. Keep this as small as possible to reduce the ways your setup can be attacked.
Network topology is the layout of your home network. Do you have multiple vlans/subnets, firewalls that restrict traffic between internal networks, a DMZ is probably a simple enough approach that is available on some home grade routers. This is so if your server gets breached it minimises the amount of damage that can be done to other devices in the network.
The first year price is a “loss leader” discount. Get you in the door, then make a profit from you in future.
Namecheap have a bit of a reputation (as can be seen here with a few people warning of poor support), Spaceship seems to be a bit of a offshoot/addition they have created, partly as it doesn’t seem to be a 1-1 comparison, and partly maybe to avoid their existing reputation?
However, it’s not entirely a bad idea to separate your registrar from your DNS provider. If one goes down, you still have access to the other to make changes. I used namecheap in the past because it was cheap, and cloudflare for DNS. If you are using both for only your registrar, it probably won’t matter much at all as you are probably not changing nameservers often, if at all, once set.
If you are going to use your desktop, I would suggest putting all of the self-hosted services into a VM.
This means if you decide you do want to move it over to dedicated hardware later on, you just migrate the VM to the new host.
This is how I started out before I had a dedicated server box (refurb office PC repurposed to a hypervisor).
Then host whatever/however you want to on the VM.
I’ve been using Trilium (https://github.com/zadam/trilium). There are desktop clients, no mobile clients. However the web interface works well enough for me that I don’t mind. The notes update in near-realtime when you make edits through the web app on multiple machines (assuming internet connectivity of course).
If you’re already self-hosting NextCloud you might want to look NextCloud Notes as well.
Very loosely it would act as a caching or proxy service from what I understand.
My understanding is that when you subscribe to community “x” on server “y”, that your server “z” starts to download all of the content from that community so it can serve it to you locally. I don’t know how fast the activitypub protocol would fetch new posts/comments, if it’s real-time, or some kind of intermittent pull or push.
Yes, it’s a bad idea to do it this way. The most likely time a RAID array will fail is during a rebuild as that is a whole bunch of drive activity over a sustained timeframe.
Better to perform a backup or copy, power down, remove all the old drives, install the new ones, power back up, configure a new array (most people recommend to use RAID 6 at a minimum, no hot spare, so you have two drive redundancy) then restore or copy back the data.
This way you can also keep the old drives as a cold backup of sorts, potentially reimporting the configuration if needed.
Plex for my Movies, TV shows, and music (plexamp for music).
Kavita for books. Also nextcloud to a degree.
Games, honestly I have not pirated in a long time, so no need to manage. Gabe Newell was right in that piracy is mainly a service problem, and to be honest Steam and GoG are convenient enough for me that I don’t feel the need to pirate anymore.
Upside: not fired.
Downside: have to do work.
Upside: make money
Downside: not enough money