If my lab goes down, it sucks, but that’s it. I have no critical service running there.

I have some recoverability, but it requires for the main router to run. If it isn’t running it’s either a HW failure, which I will not fix remotely anyway or power is down. In which case, not much I can do about it neither.

I have router with OpenWRT with Wireguard and main server (NUC) on a smart plug. If the router runs and server is mishaving to the point where I cannot reboot it, I can power cycle it via the smart plug connected to the router.

You mentioned your brother lives 30mins away - well put some tiny server in his house. Having everything at your home is not build for redundancy at all. That’s just the risk management, if you absolutely need access to your server, then 1 site is not going to cut it.

There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.

I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.

On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.

That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.

Take what you have, start small and learn from it.

Old laptops are great, because they have low power consumption and even pretty used up battery will give you power redundancy.

Even a 10yo laptop is something with 4-5th gen Core cpu and that has plenty of power to get you started.