The enormous amount of IO, especially the PCIe lanes is definitely the best feature. If I had one I’d set up a sweet server for everything. Tons of pretty powerful cores and all the pcie would make an amazing Proxmox machine.

Feel free to create something that satisfies all those requirements. Immich is the best and closest replacement to Google Photos that exists currently.

I never integrated HA with Frigate so I’m not sure on that aspect. I think it just tends to be slow in HA.

But here’s my config/guide: https://github.com/Bytelake/Coral-in-LXC

I think it's possible with a few HP tiny/mini/micro pcs, but aside from that, nothing but a few Minisforum models and the high end NUCs which make no sense anyway.

Yep. Passed through the Coral to the LXC

Hetzner is pretty cheap, easy to use, and fairly powerful.

I’m running Frigate in an LXC on Proxmox. It works pretty well.

Use cloudflared and Cloudflare Zero Trust / Access. You tunnel your services to Cloudflare, who then secures them behind a 2FA wall. No traffic ever goes to anyone aside from you.

It's designed to update, forget how to function, or both, at the most inconvenient times.

Don't bother with any of them! For $200 you can get a pretty kitted out Lenovo Thinkcentre, Dell Optiplex, or HP Elite/Prodesk that'll beat the stuffing out of any of them.

And since you're concerned about size, the Tiny/Mini versions of the office PCs are in fact, tiny. Just 1 liter in volume.

I like Hetzner. Very high price/performance, pretty easy, no complaints.

Digital Ocean or Vultr. They're more expensive but Digital Ocean is super user friendly and Vultr follows pretty closely behind.