Pax

Can’t say enough good things about ProxMox. Pair it with Proxmox Backup Server and you’re golden. If you/an upgrade breaks something, just restore that LXC/VM from backup. Can’t pay enough for that kind of peace of mind. And PBS will take care of deduplication, retention and verification.

Nginx from day one. Well documented, it works. If something doesn’t work chances are you are a quick googlefu away from the solution.

Actual.

Tried most of them about a year ago and then it was best for my needs. Situation could be different now but for me Actual still works great.

YMMV

For me 2x local pihole + unbound works great. I also have pihole + unbound running on a VPS exposed to my tailnet, serving as a backup when my home changes IP or goes offline.

When you realise that most of hosted ones make articles as read after 30 days it makes you wanna throw someone through the window.

Went all in with UniFi some time back. No regrets.

Currently running a few U6s. No real motivation to upgrade to U7s.

Tried a few, settled on Pairdrop for myself.

Actual has been working fine for me. Supports all the family’s banks and credit cards I import manually.

I have ddns on Cloudflare. It works great, until your home IP changes. After that wireguard will happily hammer the old IP, till something breaks the tunnel and it reestablishes it to the new IP. Working as intended. My workaround was forcing the IP change over night while everyone was home.

Tailscale sorts all the issues I had.

It will resolve the IP from the domain when the tunnel goes up and will keep using that one. Working as intended.

Overlay networks solve that issue.

For web services you can use free Cliudflare tier. Only it’s IPs are visible. Providing you trust Cloudflare.

For me its been wireguard with split tunnel but that had a glaring issue with my home IP change (running 2 Pi-hole+unbound instances on separate network segments and hardware). Some time ago I switched to tailscale and added a Pi-hole on a VPS. Closed system, nothing exposed to the wide internet, works 99.99…% of the time, whole family protected against low hanging fruit attacks and adds.

Thing is - “mini” PCs old enough to have 3.5 slots are probably way too old to have decent CPUs.

💭➕🙏

I would suggest 2 pi-hole + unbound stacks on different hardware, preferably on different switches. That way you can restart/fiddle with things without your family going crazy about “internet not working”.