More or less. The biggest issue is if your or their IP address changes, it’ll stop working.
I don’t know what Minecraft’s track record is on security, but I assume it’s not great. Ideally, you’d also put public facing services in a DMZ, so that if they do get compromised, they can’t reach anything else.
I use flaresolverr. Seems to work okay for me, I’ve had no issues getting stuff.
https://github.com/FlareSolverr/FlareSolverr
You could also try Usenet.
A UPS is really just for brief interruptions, and to bridge the gap until the generator comes on for extended interruptions. If power is that bad where you live, and uptime is that important, get a generator that comes on automatically when power goes out. Or solar panels and a deep cycle battery array or something.
I have one mini-ATX server with four drives in RAID 10. I find it easier to manage everything in one device. It runs Proxmox, with Almalinux in a VM that runs my Docker containers. Yes, it’s a layer of inefficiency, but I keep it that way partially because I migrated the VM to Proxmox from ESXi, and partially because I’m not confident in LXC being able to do everything Docker can.
I also run it that way because I have a handful of other VMs.
Yes, Seagate had a bad run of drives. But that was only certain models, and like you said, years ago. WD had a similar bad run after Seagate recovered, and currently they’re all roughly equivalent. But you can find Backblaze’s data somewhere if you want to read numbers.
Bottom line, there’s always a failure risk, just be prepared for it.
Also pay attention to SAS vs SATA. SATA drives are usually usable in SAS backplanes, but a SAS drive physically will not fit a SATA connector.
Also avoid SMR drives. They’re very slow because their tracks are overlapping, so one write results in many writes to update the downstream sectors.
Other than that, just pick a big name like WD, Seagate, HGST and you’ll be fine. Just buy at least one spare to have on hand, and practice 3-2-1 backups for anything you can’t afford to lose.
You should upload it to archive.org too.
That’s not strictly true. A board and CPU may not support all speeds, or mixed ranks. ECC and registered RAM would also fit but not necessarily work. There’s also low-power RAM that may not be compatible. Just because it fits, it doesn’t mean it’ll work.
In OP’s case, it’s likely to be supported because it’s probably not ECC, registered, and consumer boards usually support the most common speeds. I don’t know how compatibility on low-power RAM goes.
Are you looking at Dell/HP/Lenovo’s sites? Don’t do that, those are going to be way overpriced and way overkill. Also most of them are rack servers, not really suited to home use. If anything, you’d want to spec it out as a tower workstation.
Personally I build mine out of parts, and usually used parts. Currently I’m using a little U-NAS NS-410 case, and I replaced all the internals with something better. Total cost was less than $400, I think.
Does the error have any text that might be helpful?