The upgrade in hardware allowed me to consolidate a tonne of physical and digital space to a single machine that can do the heavy lifting of multiple machines. This was primarily because the seedbox machine needed to be running on a dedicated VPN, while the Plex machine needed access to the internet unfettered (for Remote Access to work properly without workarounds). The previous iteration of my setup saw two separate physical machines with one running as the “seedbox”, and the other running everything else.
Since I wrote this guide, I’ve moved through a few slightly different setups and settled on one that I really enjoy: a single “server” running Windows 10 Pro, and on it runs several Virtualbox VMs in headless mode for the various services required. I’ve recently rebuilt my aging “server”, upgrading it from a marginally-OK gaming machine without virtualization built in 2012 to a fairly beefy dedicated server build. Thanks to everyone who’s signed up to ExpressVPN with my referral link, I’ve received over 80 months of free service so far which indicates to me that you folks love this content! ??