High Availability not Home Assistant.

I’ve had multiple $5 Vultr VPS’s for about 5 years for simple purposes and they’ve been reliable and performed well.

Just one tech’s opinion but I’ve worked in storage for almost 20years. WD Ultrastar (formerly Hitachi) has the most consistent reliability historically. The current series of WD Gold’s are Ultrastar’s with a different sticker and often cheaper than the Ultrastar stickered version.

They are a little more expensive than their competition but worth it.

2nd Exos, 3rd everything else.

I can’t remember the last time I had one of my Ultrastar arrays having a failure. If my clients need to choose a cheaper drive on price I have tried Ironwolfs and have replaced a bunch of 10tb Ironwolfs a few 12’s.

In the consumer space the Backblaze drive failure releases are good to pay attention to.

Performance wise all SoHo CMR drives are pretty similar in the 7200rpm models.

Fastmail.com is excellent if you are considering Protonmail. Excellent performance, has a drive function and it sits somewhere between Google and proton in the privacy department.