Also if you’re considering new hardware already I really recommend looking into surplus enterprise gear. I run my whole lab on an R730XD. It holds a ton of drives, has an IDRAC (I can’t live without it now), ECC for extra peace of mind during ZFS scrubs, and they hold an insane amount of inexpensive RAM. They’re fairly cheap on eBay or from refurbishment companies. Bring your own drives with warranties though, used drives are a headache. Servers like this can be really noisy though, I keep mine in the basement.

I’ve briefly considered it but it is out of the question for me. Not enough space in the house and enterprise gear is way too noisy. This setup will probably sit next to the TV in the living room so it has to be as silent as possible.

This is really interesting, might be the way to go for me

I had thought of that, I didn’t really like the idea of using a third party service to access my machines.

Also I didn’t mention in the post, but, while my ISP gives me a public IP, I only use port forwarding to wireguard into my home networks. My services are exposed via a vps hosted on oracle cloud free tier free, which forwards public traffic to my server via another wireguard connection

How is that different from a VM and using docker inside it? Any specific advantages/disadvantages to both approaches?

No, I wanted something that I could upgrade if I wanted in the future, especially for disks. I still have 4x 3.5’ slots available in the case and as for sata ports on the mobo I can always by a controller to plug in the pcie slots