lucullus

It's good to know about the possibility with thunderbolt network adapters. I think I've already read about that somewhere. At this point I haven't really though about high speed network connection (my home network still runs on slow 100mbit routers and switches). Thanks for that tip

Ok, that sounds like a solid recommendation for the NUC. I think I can live without IPMI, especially since this is the start of my homelab (besides my RaspberryPis)

I've heard a lot about proxmox and I will definitely try it out before any other solution. Running VMs and containers side by side is a great plus.

At this point I haven't really looked at the router-with-custom-firmware game. I heard about openWRT and OPNsense, but I definitely need to do some research on that. Interesting site, though it looks terrible on mobile.

Thanks for your recommendations

In fact I already have a Synology NAS, that I have my backups on. I guess as long as the data connection doesn't need to be high speed, I can use some space on that (or even upgrade the 2TB space in my NAS in the longrun). So I probably don't need a full tower. My main concern was, if a NUC would be overpriced in relation to other similar products.