That site is lovely, thank you!

As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.

Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.

I was considering the VPN option, but as you mentioned for game servers that’s not reasonable, and for some of the collaborative tools I’d prefer being able to give people I don’t trust that much access, for instance people at work/university, to work together with them on whatever would be needed.

If I just decided to make the home server a home-only server, that would ease a lot of my worries. I guess I could get a personal one, with sensitive info but only home network access, and just rent a second one? It’s not like they’re that expensive if you’re just doing small-scale things and find a decent provider

Yes and no. I’ve seen people roughly port smaller games over in a single weekend. I’d probably take a guess of about 1-2 weeks, not multiple months. Godot is surprisingly similar. Obviously it’s not all gonna be best practice, but since it also supports c#, you can more or less just copy and paste the code and slowly sift through compiler errors, replacing old Unity stuff with new Godot stuff. It’s a pain, but not quite as much as you’d expect

Take a read for yourself: Brian Bucklew porting Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot