To satisfy you:

Well, you see my parents and grandparents don’t understand the concept of ads fully, especially in case of YouTube Shorts. After a few instances of them sharing the ads, thinking they were regular content, i just got the family plan.

If going for an inverter try a sin wave one if it’s in your budget.

Why not build a new PC or buy an old pc? One with ryzen 5 5600G, 8gb Ram, 250GB ssd should cost ~250USD whether you buy new/old, i recently checked the prices, cause I needed one and they were similar. This should take you a long way. As for storage just pick a case with enough ssd/harddisk slots.

You can also go much cheaper depending on what you get.

The advantage is you can add a GPU like the intel A380 for av1 encoding of video if you feel like you need it.

For OS depending on what you are doing there are a few choices:

• True nas: mid difficulty
• debian: i just use this with docker, does the job
• alma linux/Rocky linux
• ubuntu
• yunohost: if you would be interested in hosting activitypub apps, easy
• casaos: easy