That is a good post and I hadn’t heard of the T2S+ before. But it costs $300+ and is around 50K pixels (256x192). I see that an 160x120 FLIR Lepton module is $184 these days (Digikey). So this new stuff is competitive but not revolutionary imho. It’s good that the FLIR monopoly is finally broken though. All that existed earlier other than FLIR was very low res devices.

$11/m is a lot. If you just want a small site on shared hosting, try namecrane.com. For storage use Hetzner Storage Box.

I used proxmox and have played a little with nix and guix, but simplest is just use debian, put /home on a separate logical partition from the system partition so you can reinstall the system without clobbering user files, and as people keep saying, backup early and often.