Seconded for that. Parted Magic is so nice that when they went paid, I ponied up immediately, which is saying something from my cheap ass.

Nah. Every time I buy a new roll I print a calicat with it to make sure my current settings are good, but that’s about it.

My ISP used to block ports and have pretty strict anti hosting rules, but I moved to a place with more lax rules on hosting and set up a few things. When I moved back, I kept things exactly as I had them. They must have eased their rules because everything has worked and I’ve been back for 3 years now and they haven’t dinged me.

Add on user purge behavior and the headaches that causes. Can’t count the number of times I’ve been looking into an issue and came across a two year old reddit thread where the solution had been deleted. Much less likely to happen on a dedicated forum.

Are all your VMs on the same subnet under the NAT? If so, you should be able to set up a reverse proxy and having ir route traffic on certain port(s) to your specific servers without needing a second ip. That, of course depends on the policies of your host.

That depends on what you’re wanting to do with it. If you’re just playing around rn I’d almost recommend seeing if you can get an older desktop and mess around with virtualization/containers that way.

Advantage: a desktop machine is gonna be more expandable than a single board computer and easier to migrate when you have the money for something with more power.

Yeah, this is it. The only exception would be if you’re running everything off a single non-virtualized, non-containerized server, which is a bad idea for a whole host of reasons.