I have 3 - but I get that runtime out of one of them. Depends on load, but idle the nas doesn’t draw too much.

Well I did buy the last one a couple years ago so that tracks. CCC is absolutely the way to go though, it’s a must. I think I also grabbed one at Costco <$200 at one point.

I have a few cyber power 1000W/1500 VA units. They go on sale for under $150 now and then. Best price/power ratio I’ve found. The battery in one has lasted at least 6 years, other is going strong for at least 2. They’re big enough to power my 8 bay NAS for a couple hours. I don’t recommend DYI for a UPS, too unreliable.

I’m still a fan of synology because it does a lot of what you want out of the box without you needing to constantly manage and setup all these services from scratch. I’ve upgraded through several synology units over the years, currently using a 6TBx8 unit for much of what you mention. Since drives are so big these days, you could get a newer 4bay with more horsepower and just drop a couple 20TB drives in it as a mirrored pair then in the future add more drives as needed. Dropping to 2 drives cuts your power consumption a bit, and staying with a 4 bay instead of something bigger will also keep the power down.

You can absolutely build your own, but synology comes with all the “home cloud” apps preconfigured and your time and effort is worth something too. I build enterprise cloud environments for a living and I don’t want to have to do that at home on my free time- synology is so plug’n’play.

I also recommend a static site builder- you dont have to fuss with database or security, you can host with a simple http server, and it’s easy to work with. Hugo, Jekyll, etc

Nice about the NIC- I’m still on gigabit in the house which is fine- 100ish MBps is fast enough that copying a movie or something is still just a minute or two, but my NAS supports a 10Gb expansion card- I might upgrade one day. I don’t know how much speed I get get through my CAT 6- I haven’t tested above gigabit speeds. Really though I don’t need my LAN to be substantially faster than my internet, so gigabit is fine for the next few years I think.

Is this cable service? Cable often shares capacity with people on your “block” so when everyone is uploading, your upload suffers. I had real trouble with cable a few years ago where intermittently my upload would throttle so hard that tcp acks would fail to send and my download would tank too. FIOS was the best thing that every happened to my internet!

Yeah exactly. Also: there’s more Linux on Azure than windows, and AWS hosts more windows than all of Azure.

In my experience, there’s a reason most things on the internet are not hosted on windows.

That said, you’ll want to look at IIS as a starting point.

Honestly, I think you’d be better served learning/understanding docker and just get that up and running in windows to host stuff instead. Managing windows hosting is a bizarre mix of hoping between quasi gui property windows and control panels.