Possibly the wrong place, but personal server questions
I'd like to set up a personal cloud, probably through a vps to start. However, I'd also like to move my domains to the same server. It's been well over a decade since I did any server admin style work, so in technology years I'm old as feck.
What are my best options to look into as far as privacy/security/reliability/price for a vps? What are my best options to allow friends and family to mindlessly backup their data to our private cloud (if such a thing exists)? I'm looking for cross platform support and the ability to host multiple websites.
Another vote for hetzner. I'd even recommend their hosted nextcloud instances, because they're a pretty good value and you don't have to mess with it.
Otherwise, i've had good dealings with virmach, and they have 'cloud vps' offerings with very little compute power, but a lot of storage for an inexpensive price.
I'd also recommend biting the bullet and figuring out docker and docker compose at the get go, because it's the way people do things these days, and it's that way for a.whole lot of very good reasons.
Another vote for the Hetzner hosted nextcloud instances (which they call Storage Share, do not confuse with Storage Box which is a FTP/SFTP/WebDAV/whatever... service).
I self hosted NC in a VPS for years and not having to worry about the updates/backups is a blessing. Having used Hetzner for more than 2 years, even the smallest plan works flawlessly, and you can use several domains or subdomains to segregate your users.