My first time I started winging it with a raspberry pi, docker, and nginx and it took me like 2 months to get one service up and running and I didn’t feel it was very secure - fail2ban didn’t work, geoblocking didn’t work, and updates were manual.

When I re-started from scratch with an x86 device and cosmos it has been shockingly easy in comparison. Not only is it much quicker to spool the service up (app store), they can be automatically updated, the proxy has options for geoblocking, rate limiting, etc.
I’ve even got some of the services below built from a custom compose file instead of the app store, some use remote storage and some are set up with OAuth SSO. There’s still mild troubleshooting for a lot of things but it’s been much easier for me to understand and fix issues, plus there’s an active discord community as well.

I’m all in on Cosmos Cloud, been very happy with it