I just bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre M710Q Mini Tiny Desktop PC Computer i5 6400T 1TB SSD Win 10 Pro from Ebay for $289 AUD and plugged in some oldish external SSDs and HDDs and now have 10TB of storage. I’m really pleased with it, it took about half an hour to install Proxmox and I’ve now got 5 VMs up and running.

I wouldn’t recommend a WD My Cloud Home - it’s not a NAS as such, it’s a bit limited; I’d go for a Synology. or One Drive as you suggest - a 1TB plan is quite reasonable with regards to cost.

I had a 2010 Macbook Pro that I was about to throw away a couple of years ago because it was unusable - beach ball of death constantly. I bought a 500GB SSD for around $70 AUD, went on YouTube and about an hour later booted up; it was like a new laptop. I eventually chucked it earlier this year because the battery had it and I didn’t want to spend any more on it.

Thanks for the responses; it seems I can’t really do it. I looked into ZFS but if I use that it halves the available disk space to 2TB. I’m using the VM for a media server and thought it would be better to have 1 4TB space instead of 2 2TB disks. At the end of the day it isn’t a big deal, I just thought I’d be able to present both disks as 1.

Seems a lot faster today - great work!

As an IT support person, I’ve learnt to dumb things down for management. They don’t want to hear stuff like “Increased the SGA, changed the buffer size and added a function based index…etc”. Sometimes I’ll do a short and a long version something like “the issue was around memory settings which have been increased”, plus the detailed info.

I use uptime kuma for monitoring - really easy to set up and very versatile

Thanks for all the suggestions - I think Tailscale is the way to go, it didn’t take me long to set up and there is a client for all my devices.

Thanks for all your efforts, must be quite a challenge when the subscriber numbers treble in a few days.

Adding my 2c - I think it depends on if you want something that just works out of the box, or if you want to tinker and play with a DIY solution. I have a Synology DS220+ that just works, is easy to manage, has loads of apps etc. I also have a Raspberry Pi with Openmediavault installed and 3 SSDs attached which required a bit of setup, is more complex to get things working, also has apps (plugins) but is more of a project.

This is what worries me - an instance creator terminates the instance for whatever reason, then all the accounts and posts are gone. Or the creator could hold the instance hostage - “Hey guys, costs are building up and I’m going to have to shut it down unless people donate”

First time here for me, and I’m confused as well.
Say there’s a ‘movies’ community on this server, and one on lemmy.ml, and over time the one on ml becomes the definitive one, do I need to have an account on the ml server as well or is there a way to be able to see multiple communities on different servers in my stream?
Thanks for taking the time to help us newcomers out.