other than hardware (close to anything you got lying around + dirt cheap used 3.5" drives) I don’t see what the expensive part is. granted, if you follow the youtubers with their specialized builds with $400 motherboards and virtualize this and kubernette that, sure, that’s gonna cost you. but if you disable transcoding on the server and store standard 1080p h264/x265 files that practically anything can play, a humble 10+ year old PC will do just fine.

start small - you already have a PC of some sort, run jellyfin server on with a couple of movies and shows and make it work. once it works within your household, look into accessing it from the outside. once that works, add an user or two.

once you make all of that work then you can look at drawing up optimal specs and setting up a separate box and whatnot.

the lina thing is an alter ego of the dude that quit already so this is made up bullshit, chill out with the apple-men-in-black scenarios.

linode is super-expensive, so it isn’t that hard to be cheaper. we had to use hostinger for a while (< 10 instances concurrently) and I didn’t like it. also I think they want you to prepay for the year which is a major turnoff. they use an inferior virtualization system, forgot which, and there were issues with availability. this was all about two years ago, no idea about their current offering and state, but I remember being glad to be rid of them.

first time I heard of it. why is it that, the knees? looks like a trillian type-of-thing. wants my email. only appimage available. oh it’s electron crap. website isn’t great, the copy is super-amateur hour. it got acquired by the wordpress lunatic. I mean, OK, but doesn’t look very promising.

I’m using macast. no recent development but works fine for what I need it (play full-screen video with mpv when sent from mobile device). on the phone you need allcast or similar app that you share the e.g. youtube video to.

switched my server from i7-870 (my ex-workstation) to Pentium G6405 (got it free). switch went without a hitch, debian with a ton of docker services (jellyfin, servarr, pihole, radicale, etc.), 8 GB RAM only. although it’s a quadcore to dualcore switch, no performance issues. I know there are better options out there, but I don’t spend money unless I really have to.

they can get fucked with those prices, along with the fat fuck with the skinny jackets. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time.

RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed at $170 in 2017. almost a decade later, midrange starts at $600? gtfo.

maybe there’s some way to filter out the stepmothers with the stepfathers on the stepladders…?