Thanks for your time and consideration. I planned a few different builds with an N100, but everything priced out way more than I wanted to spend, even without drives. I saw this server for $80 on FB marketplace, and that was that.

RAID1 is only for the Proxmox installation, them I will use ZFS for the block storage.

Thank you for your insights and suggestions. Very glad I didn’t buy anything yet. There appear to be a number of PCIe options for using both SATA or NVMe, but I’ve decided to get a couple of smaller, cheap 2.5 SATA SSDs just for the OS.

The plan is to just have Proxmox installed RAID1 on the two SSDs for redundancy, then the real data array is 4x12tb HGST in some ZFS configuration. Does this seem sane?

What is more expensive for your organization: time or money? In general, your options that cost less take more time to setup, and vice versa.

It seems like cheap is more important, so I would roughly do:

• SSG like Hugo or MkDocs
• store the content in S3
• serve with a CDN like Fastly or CloudFront
• authentication via VCL or a Lambda using OAuth