Yeah they’re good now. In the early days they had a lot of quirks and also a lot of people weren’t settling them up correctly so older support posts have a lot of negative guff. But with their new setup and support apps (Unifi+wifiman) the success rate of getting things working how you want for a first timer is much higher these days.

Their new policy VPN routing and DNS filtering options in the ultra and max units makes the loss of full x-sense control less of an issue.

I used to have 2 gateways one pfsense VM and one physical to sort out filtering and stuff but I switched to ubiquiti and it does everything I need in one easy to manage unit again.

Serif Affinity

Ubiquiti is good. You just have to learn how it works. But that’s like any software defined network. There are times when they will give you a little too much control expecting you know the consequences of your actions and you send the wrong config and lock yourself out. They do make mistakes in their firmware but nowhere near as much as inexperienced techs make a mistake and blame the equipment.

I think I’d buy 2nd hand quality server drivers before I’d shuck.

I use idrive e2. When I did the math it’s yearly up front cost works out what deep archive is without an egress fee and it’s quicker. In the fine print there is a fair use policy on downloads but I think it’s 5x the storage amount.

Deep archive storage alone without puts is $24 TB year. idrive is $15 first year $30 subsequent. But it behaves more like s3 standard instant retrieval which is much more expensive.

Small company but have been around a long time now.

This is the Internet. No witch trial just witch burning.

High Availability not Home Assistant.

I’ve had multiple $5 Vultr VPS’s for about 5 years for simple purposes and they’ve been reliable and performed well.

Just one tech’s opinion but I’ve worked in storage for almost 20years. WD Ultrastar (formerly Hitachi) has the most consistent reliability historically. The current series of WD Gold’s are Ultrastar’s with a different sticker and often cheaper than the Ultrastar stickered version.

They are a little more expensive than their competition but worth it.

2nd Exos, 3rd everything else.

I can’t remember the last time I had one of my Ultrastar arrays having a failure. If my clients need to choose a cheaper drive on price I have tried Ironwolfs and have replaced a bunch of 10tb Ironwolfs a few 12’s.

In the consumer space the Backblaze drive failure releases are good to pay attention to.

Performance wise all SoHo CMR drives are pretty similar in the 7200rpm models.

It gets hate for the number of users over the years who run a seemingly innocuous update and it suddenly nerfs their server and they have to roll back and wait and ponder why it happened meanwhile being stuck without updates until they figure out why. I left because of it but I’m told it doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it once did.

Fastmail.com is excellent if you are considering Protonmail. Excellent performance, has a drive function and it sits somewhere between Google and proton in the privacy department.

A long time ago Microsoft and some teaching sources used .local in example documentation for local domains and it stuck. Like contoso.com was Microsoft’s example company. I was taught to use .local decades ago and it took a very long time to unlearn it.