It depends on the load on the disk. My main docker host pretty well has to be on the SSD to not complain about access times, but there are a dozen other services on the same VM. There's some advisory out there that things with constant IO should avoid SSDs to not wear out the read/write too fast, but I haven't seen anything specific on just how much is too much.
Personally I split the difference and run the system on SSD and host the bulk data on a separate NAS with a pile of spinning disks.
I know some VPN providers have their own DNS service that you can use similar to other filtered public DNS. If you mean an in house DNS/VPN gateway then what you want is probably best served by something like a firewall distro (opnsense/pfsense) to handle both of them.
Been a while since I used proxmox but that's the nature of a lot of those free/corporate type softwares. The free 'community' edition is pretty well a public beta that you can get forum level support for, or sometimes you can get paid support at some limited level.
Lots of them, if you want something large and powerful you could set up security onion, mirror a port and it'll capture everything plus graph and slice up things all over. Needs a fairly hefty box not to choke if it gets fed a lot though.
https://www.grepular.com/Transparent_Access_to_I2P_eepSites
Something like this makes logical sense, but can't say I've ever tried such a feat. As a general rule though keeping the gateway/firewall free of extraneous software is a good practice just to limit the potential attack surface. If you try it I'd create a dedicated VM somewhere to host the i2p/Tor gateway from to keep it off the network edge directly.
Not sure if you mean to run the service on the FW or what 'handle' means here. If you have a second box though it would be easy enough to run all those services on a distinct server and then route their relevant ports through there with a policy based route on the firewall. That way you would only have to set up one for node for example and just have the client machines use that.
Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like 'IAAS' seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.
The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city's access rate fees.
Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.
Pretty well every case I've read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about 'muh free market/choice' but that's the case for any public works really.
Hard to say, but with how few sizeable chunks of natural stone/metal meteors make it through it's tough to expect some relatively fragile satellites would survive the trip down.
I guess it'd be a fuzzy space that falls right in why VCRs and cassette decks with record functions where allowed to exist. Time and format shifting are generally allowed, but retention or lending of it would be feasibly unauthorized distro. It's that space carved out by the Sony/Betamax rule that says 'if a tech has substantial non-infringing use then go for it' in effect.
Self hosted in this context is pretty well aimed at the 'I do a service on my own time and usually own gear' crowd. IT for a company is an entirely separate thing. Professional self-hosting would be more on a community like 'serveradmin'.