No i mean instead of OpenVPN i would recommend you look into using Tailscale. If you want to fully self host it then you can run the open source control plane called Headscale instead of relying on Tailscale’s (the company) free service tier on their own control plane.

The Tailscale client and server are also open source.

You’ll always have bots knocking on your doors. In general keep the doors locked and you are fine.

I highly recommend trying tailscale with headscale over openvpn.

There is a somewhat native file editor in nextcloud but for your needs I would recommend setting up integration with either OnlyOffice or Collabora (LibreOffice). I am currently using OnlyOffice and while my utilization isn’t much or often it seems to do what it should without any fuss.

Haven’t had any issues whatsoever.

I’ve done nothing special regarding security and have it exposed to the public internet. I intend on having fail2ban look at its logs but I’ve not yet set that up (entirely out of laziness).

If you want to be very secure I would recommend having it entirely behind a VPN. I personally use tailscale+headscale for my internal only services but like I said I have Nextcloud publicly exposed as I want to be able to access it from potentially any device.

As far as the “what you want” stuff goes, Nextcloud can do all of it and I use it for exactly that.

That is not correct. A VPN would be one method but you can also just expose the service to the internet in a number of ways and accomplish the same thing Plex provides.

No. You have to expose your server to the internet in some way bit you don’t have to set up some sort of VPN. There are plenty of people who will tell you how awful of an idea it is but if you make smart choices it’s not a big deal.

You should build the hardware around what your compute requirements dictate. A NAS needs little in the area if compute power but Minecraft could be a little demanding. Review the Minecraft server requirements and build based on that. Or build to Max out your budget and get the best you can up to that point.

The -R is the recursive switch

I just expose it to the internet.

OnlyOffice has been working fine for me though I’ve not used it in serious capacity.

I initially started with Collabora but for some reason I couldn’t get it working. This is surely not an issue with the product though and entirely my fault.

Set up what you want on what you already have and if your workload is more than your hardware can handle then upgrade.

Overall most of what you rattled off isn’t too resource heavy but 12gb of memory isnt exactly a lot and i dont know what your minecraft server will eat up.

Alternatively look up the recommended minimum specs for each of your desired applications and add up the needs.

Additionally if this isnt going to be a headless system and you want a desktop gui that consumes resources as well.

Whats wrong with NPM?