It allows me to connect into the house via the VPS without opening ports or knowing my home address.

Nowadays there are various companies offering tunnelling services, but my setup has been working for a long time and I see no reason to change.

It’s the root OS; that Pi is a media centre in the living room (plus it’s taken on a few extra duties since it’s always online). It’s been going for a good few years now, 8+?

I’ve been running OSMC (Kodi on Debian) plus a few useful things like maintaining a reverse SSH connection to a VPS.

Yup: Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

I plan to switch over later when it makes sense to - the nice thing about Backblaze is that it scales with your storage, whereas with Hetzner you have to jump from 1 TB to 5 TB.

It’s for storing a few terabytes of fairly static media (for the most part, write-once). The codebases using it don’t natively support object storage (and will be in Docker containers).

It’s on a Hetzner server, and Backblaze (even after the price increase) will be a lot cheaper than normal drives, although their storage box option is probably better value over about two GB.

When I last used Debian, I found myself very annoyed with the lag in the package manager. This is a very long time ago (15 years?), so probably isn’t the case any longer. However, due to laziness (or proactively avoiding a bikeshed rabbit hole) I didn’t check and just chose Ubuntu over Debian the other day because of that.