Single unit for only 30m² sounds a bit excessive. At the house we have one split unit and it has ~170m² in two floors. On top of that we have electric heating in the wet spaces (shower, sauna, laundry room) and couple of radiators in the bedrooms (which are rarely used). Those alone would are just fine most of the year, but we also have a pretty big wood oven and a wood stove and while we could use only the heat pump+radiators it’s a lot cheaper to use wood during winter. Also warmth from the oven feels better, but only for heat it’s not strictly necessary until temperature drops below -25C.

That’s pretty crazy, specially considering that UK doesn’t require as arctic-proof pumps as we do here. The absolutely cheapest pump I can find right now is 199€ (without installation obviously). I wouldn’t really recommend that, it’s the cheapest piece of shit you can get. I have previous “cheap” model from that particular store in garage and efficiency on that drops dramatically when it’s below -20C, but it does function even after several years.

Cheaper bosh/samsung/panasonic are around 900€ for the unit and full installation is around 500, but if you put some elbow grease there yourself it’ll be around half of that.

Out of interest, just how expensive are they? I can get a minisplit heat pump installed on our house for about a 1000€ (higher end models are obviously more expensive) here in Finland. It requires a small-ish hole trough the wall for pipes/wires, but otherwise the installation is pretty easy.

We have one in the house and another in garage and both have already paid for themselves since I don’t need to run electric radiators anymore. Newer models would be even more efficient, but as the current ones still work they’re not the first thing on the long list of house maintenance.

For whatever reason ISPs tend (at least in here) to be pretty bad at keeping their DNS services up and running and that could cause issues you’re having. Easy test is to switch your laptop DNS servers to cloudflare (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1) or opendns (208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220) and see if the problem goes away. Or even faster by doing single queries from terminal, like ‘dig a google.com @1.1.1.1’.

If that helps you can change your router WAN DNS server to something than what operator offers you via DHCP. I personally use opendns servers, but cloudflare or google (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) are common pretty decent choices too.

Depends on what you’re looking for, but for server use even a bit older hardware is just fine. My proxmox server has Xeon 2620v3 CPU and it’s plenty for my needs. For storage I went with SAS-controller, controllers are relatively cheap and if you happen to have a friend in some IT department you might get lucky when they replace hardware. RAM is a pain in the rear, but 8GB DDR4 rdimms work still just fine (if someone is interested I have few around)

Personally I wouldn’t pay current prices for new hardware, specially if it’s for hosting. A bit older, but server rated, components give a lot more value for your money.

No deduplication, encryption nor support for non-linux operating systems for a start.

Not from my wife if I lose our photo collection which has been building up since we got our first digital camera 20ish years ago.

I have dynamic dns address and a handful of CNAME records on my domains pointing on that dyndns-address so I can use ‘proper’ names with my services. When my public IP changes it takes a few minutes for the records to update, but it usually happens only when my router reboots so it’s been good enough for me.

Also I use two separate dyndns providers so there’s likely at least one working DNS entry to my network.

I’ve always liked the way slashdot handles comment rating. It’s a bit complicated, so maybe that’s why it’s not adopted elsewhere, but it gives a much more fine grained options instead of just up/downvote.

ISP obviously don’t see the traffic inside your own network, regardless of the router used. But as soon as you open any kind of connection over the internet, incoming or outgoing, your ISP has to have some information about it to route the traffic. DNS over TLS doesn’t hide that your browser opens connections to servers, they can see if you use wireguard to access your services (not which ones, just in general that there’s traffic coming and going) and even if you use VPN for everything they can still see the encrypted VPN traffic and, at least technically, apply pattern recognitions on that to figure out what you’re doing. And if you use VPN then your VPN provider can do the same than your last-mile internet provider, so you’ll just move the goal by doing that.

Last-mile ISP is going to be a middleman on your network usage no matter what you use and they’ll always have at least some information about your usage patterns.

ISP can see your traffic anyways regardless if their router is at your end or not. In here any kind of ‘user behavior monitoring’ or whatever they call it is illegal, but the routers ISPs generally give out are as cheap as you can get so they are generally not too reliable and they tend to have pretty limited features.

Also, depending on ISP, they might roll out updates on your device which may or may not reset the configuration. That’s usually (at least around here) made with ISPs account on the router and if you disable/remove that their automation can’t access your router anymore.

So, as a rule of thumb, your own router is likely better for any kind of self hosting or other tinkering, but there’s exceptions too.

I agree. It’s a bit tedious to configure, but rock solid and has all the features you could ask from a proxy.

I’d guess there’s some tools which rely on RSS feeds or something to update seeds automatically, but that’s just a gut feeling. Also it shouldn’t be too difficult to write your own, but I don’t know if anything ‘production ready’ is out there.

Discoverability is one issue and trust for longevity is another. No bigger distribution is going to rely their official download links on an individual home lab which can disappear overnight. Also I guess there’s also guestion if images are provided as is without adding/removing your own ‘extensions’, but that’s what cheksums are for.

And this is obviously on a general level, I’m not trying to suggest that xana is not trustworthy :) But torrent seeding is a helpful thing for community, and easy/safe to set up.

Sound and power consumption. At least in my case those are important if I was going to store data at my mothers house. Power consumption might not matter that much, but HDD sound definetly does. And even with spinning rust hardware cost would be somewhere around 250€ compared to ~20€/month of cloud storage.

YMMV, in my scenario it’s just easier to use a cloud provider.

That absolutely works, but when I built my offsite backup to hetzner I also thought about setting up own hardware and came to conclusion that for myself it doesn’t really make a ton of sense. New RPi + 4TB ssd/m.2 drive with accessories adds up to something around 400€ (if that’s even enough today), or few years worth of cloud backups. With own hardware there’s always need to maintain it and hardware failures are always an option, so for me it makes more sense to just rely on big players with offsite backups. Your case might be different for various reasons, but sometimes renting capacity just makes more sense in the big picture.

I’m using proxmox backup server to make copies of full virtual machines, it takes care of encryption and verification of the data, so it’s not exactly the same than your scenario. Borg Backup is commonly recommended, but restic and dejadup are worth checking out too.