Osayidan

You might not even be able to install modern OS on it as many are starting to drop support for old hardware, I know the linux kernel did some pruning recently.

mail is the one thing I refuse to self host for the simple reason that despite not being particularly hard to get up and running initially, when it doesn't work for whatever reason it can be and often is a gigantic pain in the ass to deal with, especially when it's something out of your control. For personal there's very good free options, for enterprise those same free options have paid options.

Whether it be gmail having a bad day and blocking you or whatever cloud provider or on prem infrastructure crapping out for long periods of time causing you to be cut off from email for a while and potentially missing incoming mail permanently if the retries time out. Or anything in between. It's one of those things where I'm glad it isn't my problem to deal with.

My only involvement with email is ensuring I have a local copy of my inbox synced up every week so if my provider were to ever die I still have all my content.

Before even worrying about the content of individual torrents people should worry about the sites themselves being full of ads, spyware and other garbage that generates revenue for shady people. There's a reason beyond just privacy that people use rss and magnet links. In an ideal scenario you never go to an actual torrent website.

Buy the domain itself wherever you want. I like cloudflare, and a lot of people also suggest porkbun.com. You then point the nameservers for your domain to whatever DNS service you want. If you stick to cloudflare then it's already done for you.

For dynamic DNS I use cloudflare's one using my router to keep it updated. It's easy to set up. Depending on your router you may need to run a service on a machine to do this instead. things like pfsense/opnsense should have it built-in.

You likely wouldn't be using cloudflare for that level anyways, since you want it to work when you're offline you'd bypass them entirely with local DNS server, local reverse proxy+certs. You'd use something like certbot with let's encrypt which works fine. https://certbot.eff.org/

You're right but you can get a wildcard for that level as well.

If you mean accessing them from within your LAN while your internet is down then no it won't work.

What you should be doing is either split horizon DNS (LAN resolves local IPs, public resolves public IPs) or use different DNS hostnames internally, for example media.local.yourdomain.com

You then set up a reverse proxy in your LAN and point everything to that, use a let's encrypt wildcard cert using the DNS challenge method so you can get *.yourdomain.com protected with a single cert. Since you use cloudflare you can use the cloudflare API plugin with certbot, it'll automate everything for the DNS challenge and no need to keep opening ports or configuring http/https challenges every couple of months.

I went with docker but back then their documentation for it was trash and hardly worked. Had to trial and error it until it was functional. Hopefully they fixed that by now.

If you host the instance just for your own account to be under your control there's hardly any overhead. I'm running it in docker in a debian 12 VM with 1 GB ram, 1 virtual CPU and 50GB virtual disk. Haven't had any issues.

I had forgotten that you could pay them.

That's one way to kill the WWW.

Those features make sense for people who mostly use mobile, however the price increases make it a lot less appealing even then. At some point people will realize they are paying more to play a video in the background or without ads than for netflix/disney or whatever people like these days.