I have a Synology. I love it, but if you’re on a budget build one server and use that for storage and hosting all your stuff.
Use PCPartsPicker and build yourself a full desktop tower. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gHLHxg. You can get a lot for your money on the used market, but it will use way more power and will be slower.
For above build I picked lower to mid range components, but you can see what matters to you most. Maybe get a CPU with more cores and less storage to start and add more storage later. Or do the opposite if you don’t care about CPU but want more storage now.
Some hardware notes, do get AMD CPU and stay away from Intel. Last 2 years of their CPUs are plagued with major issues. Do also get DDR5 ram and whatever motherboard supports that. Get a fast NVMe for your OS drive. 1Tb should be plenty.
Finally don’t install Ubuntu on it. Two options for OS: if you want to use it as a nas then use TrueNAS Scale otherwise use ProxMox. Then you can create a virtual machine on either one of those and install Ubuntu on that if you still want to. You can also run containers on both of those.
I have a Synology. I love it, but if you’re on a budget build one server and use that for storage and hosting all your stuff.
Use PCPartsPicker and build yourself a full desktop tower. Something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gHLHxg. You can get a lot for your money on the used market, but it will use way more power and will be slower.
For above build I picked lower to mid range components, but you can see what matters to you most. Maybe get a CPU with more cores and less storage to start and add more storage later. Or do the opposite if you don’t care about CPU but want more storage now.
Some hardware notes, do get AMD CPU and stay away from Intel. Last 2 years of their CPUs are plagued with major issues. Do also get DDR5 ram and whatever motherboard supports that. Get a fast NVMe for your OS drive. 1Tb should be plenty.
Finally don’t install Ubuntu on it. Two options for OS: if you want to use it as a nas then use TrueNAS Scale otherwise use ProxMox. Then you can create a virtual machine on either one of those and install Ubuntu on that if you still want to. You can also run containers on both of those.