Agree with everybody else here: don’t pay anyone for this.
We’re all a bunch of people hating that everything costs so much, so we selfhost what we can.

Use us, learn from our mistakes, make your own and start over when you fuck up to badly. We’ve all done it and still do it.
We’ll hold your hand every time you come back and ask for help, as long as you’ve shown at least a tiny bit of effort on your end.

Depending on your timezone, I could hop in a quick Discord call and nudge you in the right direction if it gets you going. I have some experience with ADHD so I know from second hand experience how you feel.
My TZ is CET.

Best of luck anyways!

Nice!

We always get to mountain, then run out of steam before restarting a few months later.
Have fun!

I agree.

Separate NAS/storage from server for some redundancy, and flexibility. SMB or NFS for access to files.
It’s also nice paying a premium but letting someone else be responsible for keeping it running.

If you have a distaste for Synology after their recent antics, then go with someone else.

I’d say go with a 4-bay and put two disks in, then you have loads of room to expand in the future. This is mainly because of Jellyfin and how these libraries have a tendency to grow a lot with time.

You’re not wrong, but I think you might be leaving some future capabilities on the table, that’s it.
There is nothing wrong with running everything through Portainer at all. It’s how I started myself. The downside is that it’s limited if you ever wish to do e.g. HA OS or a sandboxed OS for testing/playing around. Automatic backups, re-sizing LXC’s or giving more memory is also easier to do with a GUI than in CLI. At least for me hehe.

That’s the great thing about self hosting though: if you’re happy with it, then it’s perfect!
Don’t change anything because someone tells you to if it works for you, friend!

Yeah it’s a bit of an unfair comparison that. Hypervisor VS conainer manager.
The reason you run Proxmox is to do «everything» in one place, including docker.

If all you host are containers, then I agree it’s overkill, but if you want VM’s and containers combined, maybe even in a cluster, then Proxmox is hard to beat.

I host LXC’s with Portainer inside Proxmox, as I find it easier to deal with and maintain. Then in a VM I run the full HomeAssistant OS instead of the Docker image.

Unless you don’t need it at all, I’d recommend you give it another try. It’s a very flexible system that «does it all» once you get going.