That seems like quite a large endavour. And I’m always a fan of alternatives. One thing I do not fully understand is the, I do not want to selfhost so its federated. Somebody needs to host in the end, why can’t it be you?

To improve security of option 1 you could use a keyfile, that is either only transferred manually to devices or stored at a second cloud provider.

The two main reasons I decided to opt for a VPS was, that I don’t have a PC here that is efficient enough and the faster fresh installs and snapshots are a pro too.

Thanks this is quite helpful!