Hetzner has VPSs and YunoHost as an option. You could do that for Uber $10/month. But, otherwise, anything used with an SSD. You’ll need ddns with port forwarding and likely a reverse proxy as well.

I’ve run a few models that I could on my GPU. I don’t think the smaller models are really good enough. They can do stuff, sure, but to get anything out of it, I think you need the larger models.

They can be used for basic things, though. There are coder specific models you can look at. Deepseek and qwen coder are some popular ones

If the CIA wanted to put a keylogger on your phone, it would be customs, the CIA would intercept it at some point, possibly in customs, then put it in the boot loader or on the SSD firmware or something so you’d never know it was there and wouldn’t reasonably be able to overwrite it no matter what.

That probably doesn’t help you though. If you want to be sure you’d have to reflash every bit of the phone, not just the OS.

I don’t want to ask about the chocolate

I didn’t move shit haha. Dumped OneDrive onto the Nas and mounted it for next cloud, I didn’t even clean out the photos, which I copied into immich. I did move some ebooks, but that was very few things that I have

I used to. I once turned a laptop into a Windows media server just to host movies and music for the house. That was fun

Anything that fits the socket and has the IO and form factor that you need is fine

You may be overestimating your requirements a bit. For video, all you need is something with a transcoder and it could handle at least one stream. If this is just for you, it’ll be idle most of the time. As long as the hard drives have good reviews, it’ll be fine.

What you listed sounds good. I have my entire family’s files and photos (with some duplicates that i never removed) and it comes out to less than 1TB.

I think your idea sounds fine. An old PC will do fine.