

Proxmox on a Lenovo micro form factor is probably a good cost effective option. Get a business class ThinkCentre, like an M720 or something similar that’s 3-5 years old that a corpo has just upgraded away from, i5 or Ryzen 5 with however much storage and RAM you want. Spin up a container specifically and only for PiHole+Unbound (and consider adding a pi or some other dedicated hardware for DNS later on for redundancy in case your main goes down), and then the rest is however you want to build your environment.
For me, I’ve got a Pi dedicated to 3 key tasks: PiHole, Unbound, and PiVPN (edit: and Nginx Proxy Manager. It’s dedicated to 4 key tasks…). It’s basically my filtering interface between the home network the rest of the internet immediately after my router handles the frontline defenses, and then I’ve got a Proxmox cluster to run most of the rest of my internal services.
Last I checked, the total number of dead and missing was 130. I hope the final number of deaths ends up being less than 130.