If anyone is looking to get started with a homelab at a good price, I can highly recommend checking ebay for a Dell Wyse 5070. They flooded the market for $50 and are likely powerful enough for many needs. They have a M.2 slot that support SATA. The 'extended' version also has space for a small pcie card and has a parallel and 2 serial ports for a blast to the past.

This was exactly a use case I had in mind when building https://canine.sh -- also uses k3s as a provider, and provides a Heroku-like devex.

How to actually reliably expose a homelab to the broader internet is a little tricky, cloudflare tunnels mostly does the trick but can only expose one port at a time, so the set up is somewhat annoying

The encryption is interesting but I wouldn’t call this over engineered at all, in fact it’s rather basic compared to a lot of homelabs I see people building particularly where people are doing K8s or similar over multiple machines.

Also Proxmox was called out as the only choice when that is very much not the case. It is a good choice for sure, but there are others.