I have an O365 instance hosting my own domain for mail

Check the processor generation for H.265 / HEVC compatibility, I had an older HP G8 and it needed to fire up 20+ cores just to transcode a 300Mb anime

Millions of hostile computers are cruising the internet looking for literally anything that can be exploited. Do not give them an opportunity by exposing a login page unnecessarily.

I did start over recently - Dell R730 salvaged from work, 64 cores, 256GB RAM

Took the guts and moved it to a Machinist X99 motherboard in a Rosewill server case so I could put in silent fans and have room for 15 drives.

Proxmox hypervisor booting on 2x 2TB NVME drives.

Bought 6 x 16TB drives and a HBA to run them, then did HBA passthru to a virtual machine running Truenas which mounts everything as a samba share

Multiple other Ubuntu VM’s running docker compose. One VM runs utility / ARRS, 2nd VM runs Plex so that my media playback isn’t affected by utility. These servers mount the TrueNAS samba shares for file processing. That way they are booting/running on NVME but media is on spinning iron.

Also have LXC running Adguard Home for DNS based adblock/malware protection for the entire house. Also have a Raspberry PI as a 2nd DNS server.

Several Windows VM’s used for work (I connect to customer environments so I spin up a separate VM for each customer to keep their environments isolated.

I work in IT so getting a working copy of Windows Server edition isn’t a problem. For a long time I ran my house on Windows Server - the big draw was that I could RDP to a desktop at home very easily. The downside is the constant updates, programs stepping on each other, having one app go bad and take the rest with it, constant need to reboot, etc. Plus when you run Windows server there’s a lot of stuff they turn off in the name of stability and some programs will flat-out refuse to install on a Server edition software. Meanwhile the desktop edition has limits on processor cores, RAM etc.

During one of my machine refresh/promotion cycles I took a chance on an Ubuntu server, which was able to do everything I needed. Used DockStarter to help me learn/understand Docker. Once I got the hang of that my newest home server is now a Proxmox hypervisor with HBA passthrough to run TrueNAS in a virtual machine, along with multiple windows and Ubuntu virtual machines, some of which are docker nodes (now that I understand Docker better I am able to handle the config on my own) and some stuff I use for work and simulation. I don’t have any desire to run a vanilla windows server anymore.