You might want to look up SMR vs CMR, and why it matters for NASes. The gist is that cheaper drives are SMR, which work fine mostly, but can time out during certain operations, like a ZFS rebuild after a drive failure.

Sorry don’t remember the details, just the conclusion that’s it’s safer to stay away from SMR for any kind of software RAID

EDIT: also, there was the SMR scandal a few years ago where WD quietly changed their bigger volume WD Red (“NAS”) drives to SMR without mentioning it anywhere in the speccs. Obviously a lot of people were not happy to find that their “NAS” branded hard drives were made with a technology that was not suitable for NAS workload. From memory i think it was discovered when someone investigated why their ZFS rebuild kept failing on their new drive.

Another option is subpaths: xyz.ddns.net/portainer

Just one open port, to your reverse proxy (nginx or other).

The client updating no-ip with your dynamic IP is independent of the reverse proxy software.

This sounds like a FOSS utopian future :)

There’s a few projects that have started towards this path with single-click deployable apps, you could even say HomeAssistant OS does this to some extent my managing the services for you.

I believe one of the biggest hurdle for a “self hosting appliance” is resilience to hardware failure. Noone wants to loose decades of family photos or legal documents due to a SSD going bad , or the cat spilling water on their “hosting box”. So automated reliable off-site backups and recovery procedures for both data and configs is key.

Databox from BBC / Nottingham University is also a very interesting concept worth looking in to:

A platform for managing secure access to data and enabling authorised third parties to provide the owner authenticated control and accountability.

I third Proxmix

I run most stuff as Docker images inside a VM, but also a few services as LXC containers and some non-docker stuff in other VMs