we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self
the closet Dell hosting your services is a fine system (but do fix those broken docker containers, or see about going native). under no circumstances should it be your mail host, though.
I rescued an office spec HP desktop from a trash heap and upgraded it with second hand components from https://computerstoreberlin.de/?lang=eng. Its running Ubuntu server and I use it as a wordpress dev server and also my yt-dlp machine which dumps the files into a samba share. I’m very proud of it
yeah, you can get quite damn far with something like that. best other advice I can give you is to make sure your provisioning and backups are solid (because something will break sometime), and to keep an eye on power draw
not everything needs to be 902834098234 cores and distributed systems shit
the backups is good advice. I need to put in a second drive and work out how to make it keep a backup. I’m learning all that as I go.
As for power draw, I only turn it on when I need it and it’s not connected to a display - just ssh-ing into it, so hopefully not wasting too much juice.