oleorun

Backblaze is a great backup solution. They publish drive stats and even show you the hardware they use.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/storage-pod

You can host overseas and use a proxy for hosting. I mostly don’t worry about it though because I don’t do anything illegal.

Use encryption if you are concerned.

I’ve used Hyper-V and in fact moved away from ESXi long ago. VMWare had amazing features but we could not justify the ever-increasing costs. Hyper-V can do just about anything VMWare can do if you know Powershell.

I’m doing what you want to do now. I’m running lemmy.fan on a NAS with really good hardware on a fiber connection. My ISP provides symmetric bandwidth and doesn’t block anything, though emails can’t be sent with a local smtp server since most places don’t trust the IP addresses of residential subscribers.

I learned a ton, I’m enjoying running things, and though it’s an open instance I don’t advertise it. I say go for it. Experiment and have fun. If it sucks and you hate it you just stop the containers.