It seems like reading comprehension is not what it used to be.

“Much like” == “very similar too” AKA, “close, but no cigar”

You wouldn’t compare something to the same something, that’s kind of the point of comparisons.

Ventrillo and Teamspeak as well

I didn’t realize it was possible to host your own backend locally… I thought it was just hosting the webUI locally.

Jumping from one proprietary system to another isn’t really an improvement.

For your local PiHole DNS, where are your records for your domain pointing? I believe you should have an A record for *.example.com that points to the IP of your NPM server and then an MX which points to the IP of your mail server. If this is already the case then you can ignore this.

Also, if you are using DHCP do not have it assign your public domain to any of your hosts because that could screw up name resolution as well.

Private in this context means that it is isolated. If you want it to be private in the sense that it’s only for you to use the you just close registrations.

Anonymity and federation are kind of oxymoronic.

I believe it adds a third party server to help facilitate communication between clients.

Unraid is paid only if you have over 3(?) drives.

I personally run Proxmox with TrueNAS virtualized and an HBA card passed through. All my “apps” run in VMs on Proxmox and I only use TrueNAS as a NAS.

You may want to check out TrueNAS Scale for the OS, it is designed to be a NAS OS. You can run containers like Plex and PiHole from it.

I guess if you live in a place where electricity is super expensive this will matter. A good majority of self-hosted people don’t seem to care much as they have server racks full of old hardware.

You could buy a $300 consumer router and it would be worse than just using an old PC with OPNsense.

I recommend using a real domain name so you can pull SSL certificates that don’t require the visitor to accept a self-signed certificate.

What would it take for a residence to get an ARIN subnet?

If you are just exposing port 80 and 443 (standard web ports) cloudflare proxy is free and will work well to hide your IP.

Get yourself a domain name then use Cloudflare DNS to set an A record pointing to your home IP. If you have a dynamic IP (one that occasionally changes) you’ll want to read this: https://developers.cloudflare.com/dns/manage-dns-records/how-to/managing-dynamic-ip-addresses/

Buy a new desktop/gaming PC and retire the old one to the server cupboard.

It’s important to note that you will need 2 GPUs ( 2 PCIE or 1 integrated and 1 PCIE). One GPU is needed for Proxmox and the other can be passed through to the VM.

You’re better off using a hosting service where they allow you to change your PTR records. A static IP is the very beginning of your problems, you will likely be unable to send traffic on port 25 because residential ISPs block it.

If you really want control of your email server on your own network you can set up an SMTP relay using a hosting service and configure your local mail server to use it.

Here’s something to get your started: https://community.mailcow.email/d/1275-the-ultimate-guide-to-run-your-own-smtp-relay-server

Let’s hear the details! How did you do it?

In the settings for the DHCP on your local network what do you have set for your DNS Server? If that setting is empty try filling it with 1.1.1.1 (or whatever DNS server you want).

I recommend getting a PCIE Nic and passing it through to the VM. But you can check to make sure the firewall built into Proxmox is disabled, might be the issue.