Agree with all the comments here - old iPads make a great dashboard for Home Assistant (and most other home automation systems). If you want to wall mount it there are several vendors that offer surface or flush mount. Get yourself a poe to usb convertor and you’re done.

I might get in trouble for saying this on this channel ;) - BUT - If memory serves, Proxmox has native support for backing up to an AWS S3 bucket. I think I paid something like $3/month for it when it was setup - very minimal. While not really “self hosting”, I would argue backups are the one thing you should actually do offsite, ideally with some resiliency.

I’ve honestly had decent luck with APC but also ran a lot of Tripp Lite. Eaton is decent. Using their calculator, this model (https://www.eaton.com/us/en-us/skuPage.5S1500LCD.html) would run for 71 minutes on a 100W load. It’s going to be hard to get below $300 for an hour of runtime. You’re going to want to target 1000VA or above.

At a minimum, I always do trusted, guest, and iot. I used to do “family” but, honestly everyone just ended up on iot because it was easier to control everything from their phones. Management is done from trusted. My current setup also includes DMZ and DC vlans for the homelab. I added a gaming vlan for one gaming PC the other day and moved that machine to it since games always have a bunch of port forwarding needs.