I would personally use Debian as my first choice then use Ubuntu if there is a reason to use it over Debian. For example Ubuntu will often integrate drivers for new devices faster than Debian. But if you are dealing with hardware released more 1 year ago, I wouldn’t worry about that. Also, some applications will specifically call out Ubuntu as their supported distro.
If your Internet connection is 1g or slower just about any desktop built in the last 10 years should be fast enough. The critical thing is having a good network card. Intel is generally very reliable for network cards and you can get used ones on eBay for not to much.
The suggestion I have heard is to have the remote machine connect to the machine on a schedule and pull the backups onto itself. Then your local machine doesn’t have direct access to the backups, making it harder to compromise the backups if hacked. But this also assumes the backup machine is locked down and isolated so it is lower risk than the local machine.
I have been happy with https://batterysharks.com/ . Just keep in mind batteries are heavy so shipping costs are high.
I just started playing with Dockhand and it looks like it has a built in update schedule mechanism. It’s fills a comparable role as Portainer, so maybe check that out.
I would make an FAQ. I think for getting tone it is important to know what things are hard facts, what things are more subjective preferences, and what’s things are “we had to make a choice between options with no clear ‘best’ option”.
I would be inclined to think that if you are just renting a machine or VM and all the configuration/maintenance is your problem it would be close enough. But I am not a mod and don’t want to be.
I have a Pfsense router and run HAproxy on it. Most of the services I have run on 3 VMs in a Docker Swarm. HAproxy can point to all three and just uses the first to respond. I think this is what you are going for. I haven’t tested how robust this solution is because my primary motivation was wanting to play with Docker Swarm once I accepted K8s was not worth the effort.
Any reason you need to encrypt the host OS information? I would assume anything interesting would be in the VM and you could probably have the VM encrypt it’s own storage.
You don’t want hardware raid. Some options you can research:
Some OS options to consider:
There are probably other software/OS’s to consider, but those are the ones I have any experience with. I personally use ZFS on Truenas with a lot of help from this YouTube channel. https://youtube.com/@lawrencesystems
I run Truenas scale on home server and on the off-site backup at a friend’s house. ZFS Snapshots get synced to backup server nightly. The snapshot system is nice because it only needs to send what has changed since the last synced snapshot.
Now that I have it setup it is mostly no effort on my part. But the initial ramp up to understand Truenas and ZFS was a second job for a few weeks. HexOS may be good choice if you want the power of Truenas but the handholding of setup wizards and such. But HexOS is currently $200 and Truenas is free. Pay in time or dollars.