I haven’t. They only provide docker deployment which I’m not fond of. If they would offer an alternative installation method I may would. Heard a lot of good things about it.
At present I use Nextcloud client on my phone to backup photos and the Memories app to nicely browse them.
I don’t know exactly what you want host but I have an old Fujitsu Q920 i5 with 16 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD drive which cost me around 200 Euro.
I’m serving around 20 services on it including Nextcloud, Navidrome, Paperless NG, Emby, Matrix, Friendica, Wireguard, Zabbix, DNS blocker and a few VMs. Processor utilization is around 5% most of the time and it uses about 8 GB of RAM.
I admit that Nextcloud could be more responsive and faster but for the family it is enough.
I haven’t exactly checked how much electricity I’m using but I would have noticed a bigger change on my bill.
For backups I have a remote node at another location that retrieves ZFS snapshots periodically.
Anyway. I have this setup for 2 years now and I’m happy. It does what I expect it to do.
As a side note. i use FreeBSD with jails and bhyve for this. A Proxmox running VMs with nested Docker apps may need something more performant so be aware.
I’ve been living in Poland for the last 13 years and can only say good about the country. The language barrier still exists after all that time but luckily most younger Polish speak English. It’s definitely a nice place to life.
I cannot comment about living in Italy as I have only visited it for vacation a few times. It’s a beautiful country and people where nice everywhere but if it comes to work, I’m sure Poland has more to offer. It’s the outsourcing country of Europe. Good wages and highly qualified people.
Second that. I don’t have another node that I can use for WoL at my backup location so I opted for the node to turn on every morning, run the backup and turn off using cron at a given time. Works perfectly!
True. Getting a TB of storage is not affordable nowadays. And we know why. F*©k AI.
But here in Poland you can still find some used Q920 with the same specifications.
If you are located in Europe they would most likely send it even to your country.
This one would be like the one I have.
https://allegro.pl/oferta/solidny-i-kompaktowy-komputer-micro-fujitsu-q920-i5-16gb-2000-ssd-w11-praca-17993236542