If you want a complete unit with custom hardware and tuned custom software, look at MikroTik. Solid hardware, dependable software, good support, good community.
If you want to build your own, grab any multi-ethernet micropc from aliexpress and install OPNsense. Cheap and flexible. But you’ll be on your own once (not if) something fails.
Both of these are essentially pro-level options with lots of headroom to build up to advanced services. I’d stay away from OpenWRT which is essentially just an open source consumer grade wifi router image. You’d be replacing your crappy (but supported) router with the same thing just without support.
One other option I would mention if you like nice centralized web ui’s, have a look at Ubiquiti’s Unify. If you can afford to go all-in on a Unify router, backbone switch and wifi access points, the combined management is really a step above the competition.

For actual hardware: Hetzner. For VPS there are many choices. Digitalocean is cheap and easy, has european data centers, and some decent value add services.

Visual Studio Code, with a syncing folder, a markdown plugin that suits you, and Claude Code to sort your notes for you. :-)

Hey claude, upgrade my kernel will you? Thanks!

It will be perfectly reliable for a while. You’ll grow to rely on it, stop thinking about it. And then one day half your drives will suddenly be gone. You won’t know why, you won’t know how to fix it. Your raid set will already be broken. Your data will be gone.

Don’t plug and play with your data.

“I can’t think of any examples of companies that, in real life, enshittified because they were successful.”
Microsoft.

KeePass. Putting your passwords on someone else’s webserver is just asking for trouble.

If I understand correctly, ‘Local’ is a feed with only posts that were made on the local server. So here on lemmy.world, that would contain only posts to communities hosted on lemmy.world. Whereas the ‘All’ feed brings in posts from other servers that lemmy.world knows about. So posts from lemmy.ml or beehaw.org will be included. It does seem to take a bit longer to populate the All feed though, and you’ll notice posts ‘pop’ in as you scroll.