I think it comes down to how reliable or fast your internet is. You can selfhost a lot of stuff with reliable internet, power, and environmental variables.
If you have any of those which are less than reliable, a VPS like Linode may make sense for uptime.
Good choice, I'm glad you found something that works for you!
Rm2 is pretty fragile. Check the power button brick issues with a search engine and consider before choosing
My UPS systems have built in monitoring.
Check out mikrotik switches.
No, that's not natively supported
Yes, this seems to happen more frequent with brands like realtek. All hardware has failure rates, generally speaking more expensive and enterprise gear fails with less frequency, but can still fail. Personally, I don't enjoy hardware failure, so I invest in stable clean power and great hardware. It may cost more in the overall power budget but is less headache because things just don't fail as often.
Does not work well with icloud at all.
I sit around 5kw average.. Depending what the GPUs are doing
I just use electrical tape for these pulls.
I'd use a VPN and give your friends the credentials for access to your server(s)
Interesting. I've been in IT for over 30 years and have always used UPS systems. Never had data loss as a result of power issues. Also, it cleans the power a bit and I get a lot of life from my hardware. Plus, I dont have to worry at all, it works as intended. My entire lab has redundant UPS systems backed by a large generator ... Zero downtime is nice.