I self host.
I use nginx as a reverse proxy with crowdsec. The backends are nginx and mariadb. Everything is running on Debian VMs or LXCs with apparmor profiles and it's all isolated to an "untrusted" VLAN.
It's obviously still "safer" to have someone else host your stuff, like a VPS or Github Pages, etc, but I enjoy selfhosting and I feel like I've mitigated most of the risk.
I'd imagine that if your job is making YouTube videos, portainer and other graphical abstraction layers probably make more visually interesting videos than just watching someone type out a bunch of commands.
If you're going to be playing with custom locations and such, it might be worth using nginx directly instead of through the limitations of NPM.
I know I'm a bit late to the conversation, so I don't know if this is still helpful... But I have a camera with "AI Detection" built into it and it appears to send alerts via its ONVIF connection. I've disabled motion and other detectors on my NVR (AgentNVR) and instead configured it to just wait for an alert from the camera itself to start recording. It's been working quite well.
My initial plan was to use a coral TPU and frigate, but the Coral/Gasket drivers appear to be pretty old and I couldn't get them to work properly, myself.
Convenience. Unless you live right near the border, it's probably faster/easier to shop in your own state than drive all the way to another.
But if you do live near the border of a state without a sales tax, then it's pretty common to shop in the neighboring state, especially for larger purchases.
The US doesn't have a national sales tax, so it depends whether the individual state imposes a tax or not.
I've also been running nginx in an unprivileged LXC container. I haven't used fail2ban, specifically, but crowdsec has been working without issue.
You can mostly just treat an LXC like a normal VM.
I mostly learn from mistakes, and since homelabs are all about learning, there are bound to be mistakes.
I've borked my network multiple times, broken VMs, and redesigned things from the ground up, again.
Big lesson is to have backups. Lol
I'm using cloudflare as my nameserver and the free API seems to work just fine with ddclient.
Steam controller or PlayStation, depending on the game.
I have a couple Libre Office files where I document the non-technical stuff for my own quick reference, like network layout in Draw, or IP and port assignments in Calc. I use a git repo to store and organize podman scripts, systemd unit files, configs, etc. Probably not the most elegant solution, but it's simple and FOSS.
Reverse proxy is Nginx Proxy Manager.
For what it's worth, though, you can proxy other services, like Gemini or gopher, through the same proxy for simplicity's sake.