Just get a used ultra-small form factor PC a la the Tiny, Mini, or Micro series. A higher-end one which is 7 generations old will still absolutely destroy the Pi in terms of performance.
Once I gave up (for now) on doing all this on ARM and switched back to x86, everything got way easier to actually accomplish.
Check out ServeTheHome's "Project TinyMiniMicro" on Youtube for a great overview of ultra-small form factor ("1 liter") business PCs.
The big three PC makers each have standardized products in this form factor with (relatively speaking, compared to smaller manufacturers) tons of spare parts available.
Just wanna put in a good word about GL-iNet routers ... they are more travel- and pro-sumer focused than a lot of what's been mentioned here. They run a proprietary front end on top of OpenWRT, but if you don't like that, most of them have full support in vanilla OpenWRT.
These are definitely more for the tinkerer market, their documentation and firmware can have quirks, but that being said (and as somebody who wouldbe wary at that caveat) I have been using GLi routers with manufacturer firmware as a daily driver for 3+ years and once you get them set up they are very solid.
Might be a good option for the digital nomads among us who need a smaller device which can connect to a host network and then send all traffic over a VPN with very easy setup.
I have a background (in the distant past) as a PHP dev, and currently make my income doing mostly Wordpress work.
For a very long time I took a jaundiced eye towards big PHP apps for the exact same reasons. That being said, I just two days ago finally installed Nextcloud in my homelab and exposed it to the world.
It's worth noting that a lot of PHP's bad rep comes from Wordpress, which is terrible in security terms in large part due to a huge and very poorly vetted ecosystem of plugins written by coders of all skill levels.
PHP itself had a number of anti-features which made security difficult in the past. A lot of those issues have been worked on. As somebody who was up to my eyeballs in PHP for years during the bad old days, I'm now confident installing big PHP apps if I think the dev team and dev process are reasonably mature.
holy crap, that was ........ ... ..... .. 25 years ago???
I don't honestly remember the very first, if I had to bet I'd say it was Samba, likely on my 350MHz K6 (later snagged a K6-III+ for this board, fastest Socket 7 chip ever produced) so I could share files with my laptop, a Dell, 300MHz Celeron. Running all Linux at the time, not sure what flavors, although I first encountered a Debian derivative with Corel LinuxOS believe it or not, and have used Debian on servers about 95% of the time forever after.
My first self-hosting on dedicated hardware was a Samba share and DHCP/DNS server, since at the time routers weren't always a thing, and in fact it was plugged directly into the cable modem ... and for a while accidentally served competing DHCP to my neighborhood cable segment, causing intermittent problems for who knows how many users including myself, because the cable company didn't filter broadcast traffic!!! When I finally found that config mishap, holy shit was it an awkward monkey moment ... fix the typo and walk away slowly ... wild west days!!
Basically, subs with anti-corpo principles but refuses to leave corpo Reddit.
See also: Discord
Go with used & refurb business PCs right out of the gate instead of fucking around with SBCs like the Pi.
Go with "1-liter" aka Ultra Small Form Factor right away instead of starting with SFF. (I don't have a permanent residence at the moment so this makes sense for me)
I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.
FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there... just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.
The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you're planning to stack them vertically
I’ve set up a Discord server
:facepalm_picard:
I use NoMachine, but that's in a Linux-to-Linux environment.
Did a test last weekend sitting in a department store parking lot on the store's public wifi, wifi bitrate about 50Mbps both ways, 50ms between me and my homelab ... very very usable experience with quality set at 6/10.