I have a 64GB Crucial SSD from about 2010 that’s still going.

I use it as a boot drive for a Pi instead of using a microsd card.

Before anyone says “you put all your eggs in one basket,” let me be clear: I didn’t. I put them in one provider, with what should have been bulletproof redundancy

Tldr; “I didn’t put all my eggs in one basket. I put them into multiple smaller baskets and put those into one basket. That’s still more than one basket right? …right!?”

Use a reverse proxy in a DMZ. You can use something like Bunkerweb + Crowdsec to give you a WAF and dynamic IP blocklist in front of your web service.

I’ve been running Home Assistant (HAOS) on Proxmox for years with no issues. It doesn’t need to be on bare metal. VMs work fine.