Use ELK. It’s basically the same but open source and unlimited for free. Also splunk sucks. Have to use it at work and it really isn’t great. (My personal opinion)

That‘s normal. There are countless bot nets that scan every public available IP to hijack. Using fail2ban is already a good approach. I personally switched to crowdsec a while ago as it comes with a crowdsourced blacklist which will silence a lot of the common noise and only occasionally I get an Alarm about an IP address not already on the default list.

I got one HGST with now almost 11 years. And some WD Reds with 9 to 10 years. They run now in a Helios 64 which I use to store DVD and BluRay backups before they get tagged correctly and moved to my Plex storage pool.

Windows bad. Linux good. BSD better.

For real though. Windows cost money, it uses a lot of resources. And Desktop Version is missing vital parts you might want to use on a windows server like Domain Controller, DHCP, Server, Web Server, Hyper-V. Etc.

Those reasons also have most running Limix or even BSD because they are pretty lightweight especially when used headless. Also as open source they are mostly free of cost. And when you virtualize on a free and open source Hypervisor like XCP-ng or Proxmox you can run way more smaller VMs than Windows VMs as they need more resources.

The Bill at the end of the year.

I am using terraform to create my VMs and destroy them. Using Ansible with the xenorchestra inventory plugin and have it configure the servers I created.

As long as it is not reachable from any untrusted network like the Internet. It’s as safe as your home network is.

Nope. Plain old Almalinux and deploy my services with ansible. I don’t see benefits in the bloatware that any UI on a server is (for me).

And I know I will get hat for this from a part of the community but that’s just my humble opinion.