I don’t think Ukraine will ever surrender. They may lose the war officially and Russia take over the government buildings but it’s not a video game. The population will never forget with an unstable region for decades afterwards. We westerners can learn to accept a shitty situation if it’s the only way to have peace. I don’t think Ukraine will, they’re built different.

I’ve had multiple $5 Vultr VPS’s for about 5 years for simple purposes and they’ve been reliable and performed well.

Just one tech’s opinion but I’ve worked in storage for almost 20years. WD Ultrastar (formerly Hitachi) has the most consistent reliability historically. The current series of WD Gold’s are Ultrastar’s with a different sticker and often cheaper than the Ultrastar stickered version.

They are a little more expensive than their competition but worth it.

2nd Exos, 3rd everything else.

I can’t remember the last time I had one of my Ultrastar arrays having a failure. If my clients need to choose a cheaper drive on price I have tried Ironwolfs and have replaced a bunch of 10tb Ironwolfs a few 12’s.

In the consumer space the Backblaze drive failure releases are good to pay attention to.

Performance wise all SoHo CMR drives are pretty similar in the 7200rpm models.

It gets hate for the number of users over the years who run a seemingly innocuous update and it suddenly nerfs their server and they have to roll back and wait and ponder why it happened meanwhile being stuck without updates until they figure out why. I left because of it but I’m told it doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as it once did.

Fastmail.com is excellent if you are considering Protonmail. Excellent performance, has a drive function and it sits somewhere between Google and proton in the privacy department.

A long time ago Microsoft and some teaching sources used .local in example documentation for local domains and it stuck. Like contoso.com was Microsoft’s example company. I was taught to use .local decades ago and it took a very long time to unlearn it.

I’ve been using Vultr for years. All good thus far.