I have a home server that's now a few years old, used for a mix of large file backups (16tb raid10), file serving and sharing (nextcloud/sftp) and a few other less important applications for personal use like rss reader, music streaming etc. I'm thinking of decommissioning it soon and moving most of its use to the cloud. Unfortunately cloud storage is still very expensive when handling audio/video files so I'm planning on creating backups locally and leaving the cloud storage (around 1-2tb) for mainly file sharing as well as my other various applications.
I've already got 2 vps with digitalocean and am pretty happy with them, except for the storage price (astronomical if I wanted to add 1000GB storage to the droplets), so I've been hunting around for reliable and affordable servers that are also secure. This got me to looking at 'dedicated' seedboxes as an alternative to regular VPS. The prices for storage are staggeringly smaller. When including full root access, these start to sound very much like a traditional VPS, so I'm now wondering:
1) What's the real difference if most VPS machines out there are not truly dedicated machines- (really virtualised) but have everything you'd expect from root-access to dedicated ip address, ram and cpu usage, the same as a good seedbox? (example here of a seedbox with root access and 'machine' specs: https://www.rapidseedbox.com/#pricing)
2) Are there any inherent security downsides with a seedbox vs a traditional vps? My initial feelings are it's the same, as long as you personally secure the server thoroughly and the level of control (say root access, firewall, other typical linux security tweaks, file encryption done by myself on the server etc)
3) Seedboxes are mainly meant for fast torrenting (something I'm not interested in). So long-term reliability probably isn't their main concern when running the business, comparing it to a company offering VPS renting. Is this a fair assessment? Do seedboxes tend to be available in the long term, or is it more likely to cause me problems a couple of years along the line? (I'd obviously look for a company that's been out there for a while, but is it likely the servers reliability is not as good?)
4) Any thoughts of what else I could look into? Ideally in the 1-5tb storage range, but possibly less than £20 p/m.
John