Home Assistant is kind of interesting for solar power I guess, though I haven’t looked into it much. Otherwise it’s a smart home thing right? See the biggaybunny link I posted ;). I had to look up NZBGET and so on, but yeah, if I was trying to keep it private I certainly wouldn’t want to connect to it from home internet. I used to have a server in Romania that would have been a good candidate for stuff like that if I were into it. Download to that and then scp to home.

Nothing stops me from upgrading/downgrading VPS software any way I want afaik. Although it might less secure than a dedicated server. I have had dedis in various places at different times though my main beater machine is a VPS. I tend to think hosted servers are more secure against physical intrusions than a home server is, though who knows. The software is basically the same, and the DC’s have good DDOS protection.

Yeah you’re probably right about using a phone as a server. It’s a cool re-use though.