I’m strongly in favor of keeping things compartmentalized. I have two main servers: One is a Proxmox host with a powerful CPU and a few hard drives set up in a fast but not-so redundant array (I use ZFS, but my setup is similar to RAID10). Then a have second server that runs TrueNAS; the CPU is slower, but it has a large amount of storage (120TB physical) arrayed in an extremely fault-tolerant configuration.

My Proxmox box runs every service on my network, but all that gets stored the hard drives are the main boot disks. It backs up daily, so I’m not so concerned about drive failure. All my data is stored on the NAS, and it’s shared with the VMs via NFS, SMB, or iSCSI, depending on which is more appropriate.

For you, I’d recommend building a NAS, and keep all your important data there. Your NUC can host your services, and they can pull data from the NAS. The 256GB on your NUC will be more than enough to host whatever services you need.

4 Mbit is exceptionally slow by today’s standards; when I signed up for internet access (there’s only one provider available where I live), I told them “I will pay for whatever the fastest connection is that you can offer.” Turns out that’s just single-channel DSL. They won’t even install bonded DSL where I live, and believe me, I’ve tried. I do have Starlink as well, but because of the land around me, it’s always going to be obstructed by the land topology; when I calculated how high I would need to raise my antenna to avoid obstructions, it was several hundred feet. My pfSense box does a good job of routing traffic between my DSL connection and my Starlink connetion (and falling back when Starlink is obstructed), but for hosting anything, I need a stable connection. That leaves me with just my DSL connection.

Are you sure Youtube doesn’t pick video quality based on connection speed? It will frequently drop down to 360p when my connection speed is particularly shitty that day, and I’ll have to manually increase it (I’d rather have occasional buffering than a blurry mess).

Unfortunately, the only people who would actually want to see my home videos (family) live several thousand miles away. I’m also not sure they would even know what to do with an external HDD. Not a bad idea, though.

I honestly didn’t know that Youtube “unlisted” was even a thing; I’ve never posted a video to Youtube before, but this might be a promising idea. I’m assuming they still inject ads into unlisted videos, which is a major barrier for me… I hate ads.

I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to video and audio quality; 4k/60 might be overkill, but I think at least 4k/30 has some merit in this case. Most modern phones and tablets (and TVs) are at least greater than 1080p, so assuming they’re watching the video horizontally, 1080p video would still result in a loss of quality. Would they care? Almost certainly not, but the idea of watching a UHD video source in a lower resolution bothers me far more than it should.

It definitely seems like VPS hosting is out of my budget. I think that hosting multiple version of the same video (and paying for more HDD space) would probably be cheaper than a VPS with a GPU resources, but the recurring fees are probably more than I’m willing to spend.

I’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I run it at home with a dedicated Nvidia A2000 for hardware transcoding. It’s able to transcode multiple 4k streams with tonemapping faster than they can play.

As much as I’d love to use Jellyfin, there are two major issues: My internet connection is so slow, that I’d be lucky to stream 720p at a low bitrate. I’d spend the money on a faster connection, but I live in an area that doesn’t even get cell phone service. My options are DSL and Starlink, and I have both; the DSL is just slow, and Starlink uplink speed isn’t much better, plus I have plenty of obstructions that make it somewhat unreliable. The second problem is that Jellyfin has too steep of a learning curve. Telling my relatives “oh, if it starts buffering, just lower the bitrate” isn’t an option. Not to mention, I’d have to run it on a VPS, and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.

My personal opinion is that Docker just makes things more difficult. Containers are fantastic, and I use plenty of them, but Docker is just one way to implement containers, and a bad one. I have a server that runs Proxmox; if I need to set up a new service, I just spin up a LXC and install what I need to. It gives all the advantages of a full Linux installation without taking up the resources of a full-fledged OS. With Docker, I would need a VM running the docker host, then I’d have to install my docker containers inside this host, then forward any ports or resources between the hypervisor, docker host, and docker container.

I just don’t get the use-case for Docker. As far as I can tell, all it does is add another layer of complexity between the host machine and the container.

If it’s really impossible to add an extra drive, are you able to attach an external drive or map a networked drive that has space for your VMs and LXCs?

In your situation, what I would probably do is back up all my VMs to my NAS, replace the hard drive in my Proxmox hypervisor, re-install a fresh copy of Proxmox on the new drive, and restore the VMs back to my new Proxmox installation. If you don’t have a NAS, you could do this with a USB-attached hard drive, too.

Ideally, though, you should have separate drives for your Proxmox boot drive and your VMs. Even if you’re using a SFF PC that doesn’t have an extra drive bay, could you double-sided-tape a SSD to the bottom of the case and use this as your storage drive? I’ve certainly done it before.