This is exactly what I came here to find. Thank you for posting it. If I can be so bold selfhosters should really be leaning this way searxng is great but it still uses big tech.

The other thing we need is a way to identify good crawling agents or *smol agents over corporate bots that just steal content.

If selfhosters can unite and build a good index perhaps searching can go back to the way it was vs a vector to sell you more and collect your data.

Borg resumes where failed backups left off so if you keep running it until it completes it’ll dedupe what is already there and eventually finish leaving you with just incremental backups.

What servers or smaller form factors are going for a good price?

Check out caddy. Very straight forward syntax for a reverse proxy.

What advantages do you think the paid cert has over letsencrypt?

Ampache FTW