Reading about NAS drives, I was led to believe that the perfect home server setup had to be complicated. After all, the more the lights, cables, and complexity, the more nerd points you get. I’m kidding, but building a dedicated Proxmox box running multiple virtual machines, Docker containers, backup scripts, and more taught me a whole lot about self-hosting. It looked great on paper, and made me feel like I’d built a data center in my home office. But the constant maintenance and effort needed to keep it running optimally is less than fun. Every small change required SSH access, configuration edits, and hope that I didn’t break something I didn’t quite understand. As good as Proxmox is, it requires a certain time commitment and willingness to learn when things go south. While the latter wasn’t an issue, I just don’t have that kind of time on my hands.