Where Telegram seems to come in handy is using the bots to send alerts, e.g. from Uptime Kuma. That’s all I use it for, I presume that’s what most of us use it for?

Most definitely a scam. Website shows a different URL to the domain and the phone number is formatted completely randomly.

Yeah no.

Pointless re-inventing the wheel. Help with some existing project instead. NPM needs some help, few bugs to fix and a little bit of added functionality to make it perfect.

AdGuard Home.

Aside from other stuff mentioned here about email. I always assumed I’d become a target for spam that I’d have a harder time filtering out to the point it stops being worth it to have a custom email address.

Can’t work out how or why hosting it at home would mean more spam? Your email address gets on a list that gets pulled by spam merchants, hosting it at home doesn’t make any difference here.

Same with Bit/vaultwarden, all clients grab a copy of the vault from the server when they sync so if the server is offline all clients still “just work”.

Chances are your router can have a fallback DNS.

Chances are it can’t. You can probably set multiple DNS servers (anywhere, not just routers) but they aren’t a primary/secondary sort of deal. Most traffic might be weighted towards the first one in a list but you will find traffic still hits the others.

Build a webpage, host it on the device.

Ask the reddit devs, that’s basically how reddit started out!

The correct answer has been given a few times here, split tunnelling.

But your idea is mental. If your IP changes and access is locked down by IP address how do you expect your phone to connect to your server to tell it about the new IP if it can;t access the server due to the fact it hasn’t got the correct IP in the allow list?

Well it won’t. You either tell it to assume that say oldest is always source and if there are identical files then you get asked to choose.

DietPi. I have quite a few VMs running DietPi, very light, simple, “just works”!

I have to reluctantly use Docker which is cumbersome, awkward and confusing in comparison. A DietPi VM is simple and easy to run, use and more importantly, keep backed up. I really hate being forced to use Docker when DietPi exists and works!

Depends what you set in the DNS records and where you published them? Literally no idea tbh.

You can’t possibly know that from the limited info in the OP.

Zerotier, or any other VPN service that is outbound/cloud hosted.

What router is it/what settings does it have? If it has IP/port filtering I would imagine it would have some sort of forwarding service.

All I can say is, wut?

All of those options are fine, in that they will all achieve what you want/describe/ask. Up to you which one you do, I’ve done all 3 essentially over the years as the lab has grown/expanded/matured. Depends what your budget is and what you want to get done really.

Pretty much anything could do this, can even do it with an Excel document!