Not your question sorry, but since your hosting next cloud what’s your experience with it, because I find mine pretty slow and not really smooth

So LAN speed is 1000 WAN speed (get from mainstream speed test) is 500/500

When I’m saying VPN I basically mean access my homelab from outside, so I’m talking about commercial VPN.

All my homelab is in one subnet (included all my other devices). When accessing the speed test locally trough domain it simply resolve it with public DNS

Hope I answer your questions

EDIT : does 500/500 WAN on regular speed test means that I can have 500 on up and down at the same time, or does that means that I can only get for example 250 each at the same time?

Hi, first congrats for going the way of homelabing.

Like you first the hardware :

The elitedesk are great lines of prebuilt PCs mainly for little home servers BUT I wouldn’t recommend to you to take the mini version as it’s very very tiny and therefore doesn’t have great modularity nor upgradeability.

You don’t need to take massive servers or towers but the SFF versions of these or the normal version (starting to get big) are way better and will permit to you to have more space to tweak it and more generally have some place to put storage or else.

But if you can’t allow yourself to have at least a tiny bit bigger that’s okay and you can stay with the mini version that’s not a dummy choice.

For the storage depending on what you’re going to run in 5 years, 120GB could be not enough, adding the backups, you should consider buying at least 256 to 512GB of ssd (preferable for system (SATA or NVME whatsoever)). When it comes to raw and dummy storage, use hard drive, old schooled at first glance they are dirt cheap when getting them on discount. For storing only some videos, photos and music, 2TB usable is nice and making it mirrored (RAID 1) is nice too. But maybe (if one day comes the idea off having larger sizes) using RAID 5 could be nice as you could expend storage easily, you cannot really adapt RAID 1 to RAID 5 without manually doing backups and restoring them.

So buy some hard disks, if you want, you can buy them used (around 15-20 bucks for 2TB good used hard drive). Or you can buy them refurbished or new as you wish. When it comes to network storage hard disks are the best as you basically can’t max out basic NVME drives with your network, basic ones are at around 3000MiB/s so that means 24,000Mib/s of bandwidth so you would need a 25G network (thing that I think you don’t have).

And using more reasonable sized PCs are going to help you fitting all your drives, and maybe putting external NICs in there.

Secondly the software.

Using docker to easily selfhost is a great idea but I really don’t like portainer and mainly the way they manage docker container.

So I would suggest you 2 things if you want to get a bit into tech simply deploy your docker containers with docker compose file, once into you’ll see that it’s very simple.

But if you prefer a simpler approach while not giving up features, as you said you’re a father (congrats), I wouldn’t recommend to you YunoHost it’s a out-of-the-box platform to self host stuff very easily without pretty much technical knowledge.

If the apps are just for you and your wife (pretty close people) using a VPN that give access people to your whole local network (for really close people) or setting up an overlay VPN like tailscale (and selfhost headscale or use netbird) would be nice and pretty straightforward.

If you prefer to make it available online you can also reverse proxy services to make it open to the www from your IP, or use Cloud flare tunnels (don’t like the idea of having cloudflare snipping out all my traffic) or you can use a vps to do the kinda same thing as with cloudflare tunnels without having them on your shoulders.

That’s it for me, hope I guided you, and feel free to ask questions if you wish. Great homelabing journey to you! :)