a couple points
- proxmox hits an SSD pretty hard, continuously. I think with zfs, it probably hits even harder. A lot of it is every second keeping state for a cluster, even if you have only one machine.
- I bought mikrotik routers for openwrt. I tried out routeros, but it seemed to phone home. So I got openwrt going and didn't look back. I am switching to zyxel since you can have an openwrt switch with up to 48-ports.
- I used to run small things on a pi, but after getting proficient at proxmox, they've been moved to a vm or container.
- the most wonderful milestone in self-hosting was when I got vlans set up. Having vlans that stayed 100% in the house was huge.
- next good milestone was setting up privoxy. Basically a proxy with a whitelist. All the internal vlan machines could update, but no nonsense.
- it is also nice to browse the web with a browser pointing at privoxy. You'd be surprised at the connections your browser will make. Firefox internally phones home all. the. time.