CaptainShardmind

Ubuntu Server here, after a short stint on Proxmox that felt like extra layers for what I was doing with containers. I’m in the Nginx Proxy Manager camp too, running it on a small cloud VM with most of the hosts behind it limited to my Tailscale network, so only a couple of things face the public internet. On the forwarded-ports question, I’d guess a lot of people answered based on whether they opened ports at home, since a proxy on a VPS lets you skip that entirely. The year-over-year overlay is a really nice addition.

Retired business or surveillance hardware is worth checking locally too. My two servers are repurposed NVRs running plain Ubuntu Server, and a Dell OptiPlex handles dev work. For that list, I’d start with the hardware you can get affordably and check its RAM capacity and drive connections before buying. Docker on plain Linux keeps things straightforward. With Immich, budget for a separate backup of the photos before it holds your only copy.