Wanted to share my setup so far, in part to get some feedback, in part to share results of my own research.
Hardware
The base is an old Dell laptop with 8GB of RAM, nothing special.
For network I got cheap (~30 euro) Cudy router compatible with OpenWRT. I looked at MikroTik but it was more expensive and the setup looked more complex. OpenWRT was very easy to install and fairly easy to set up. I really appreciate the firewall, I was able to easily cut off my smart TV form the internet for example. Setting up port forwarding was also easy.
For storage I got Icy Box USB RAID, set it up to RAID 1. It was the cheapest solution I found and it works fine after a bit of fiddling (issues with the fan but it's a long story, can give more details if someone's interested because otherwise I'm happy with it). I use it for backups for now and plan on using it for slow storage in the future. I also got 5TB USB drive for media (arr). I don't care if I lose it so no backup or RAID here.
No UPS so far. I'm planning on installing solar planes with battery which should protect me from power cuts.
Software
Proxmox as a base. I hesitated if I really need it as I was planning to setup 3 VMs only but in the end the ease of backups and storage management convinced me to use it. Works great, no issues here.
VMs based on Debian.
I'm using cosmos cloud to manage my apps (https://cosmos-cloud.io/). I compared couple of different solutions and this one had the biggest library of supported apps and uses docker (I like the additional security provided by containers). It works great so far and has all the features I needed.
I chose netbird for VPN and I'm not happy with it. The Android app has serious issue with battery usage. It was reported long time ago and it's still not fixed. That's really sad because otherwise the app is great. I'm trying to switch to netmaker now. Why not tailscale? I don't want to tie myself to a closed source app like that.
Backups
VMs backed up by Proxmox daily, stored on the RAID and synced to external server (VPS with NFS drive).
Network and VMs
One internal server accessible only thorough VPN. It hosts *arr stack and bitwarden.
One external server accessible through port forwarding in OpenWRT and nginx with fail2ban. It will host forgejo, my webiste and so on.
One exit node VM running nord VPN.
Phone with always connected VPN routing everything through the exit node.
Bitwarden with self-signed cert imported on phone.
Monitoring
Simple monit scripts pinging individual servers, checking VPN status and status of hard drives.
I've been running it for couple of months and so far everything is working great. I want to setup the external server next, test the backups and switch to self-hosted netmaker for VPN.
Anything else I should do or anything I should stop doing?
Looks good.
Only thing I would caution on is all of that USB storage. USB isn't exactly known for it reliability when used long term for storage devices. Given the current market, however, It will do. When you can afford to, I would move the server into a tower with the storage on SATA.
Just to note - or a standalone NAS.
Personally I have two NAS and one older PC ive turned into a NAS, both options work just fine, becomes a question on price/availability and a motherboard that supports the drive quantity you have/want to expand to.