Well, you shouldn’t trust anyone’s hardware, ever, imo. It’s all fucked. But, you can’t exactly build it yourself and building in risk tolerance at the hw level is annoying as hell too. So at some point you gotta get over it & have some amount of trust in at least the manufacturer, to some extent. But as a generalist sysadmin, I’m able to help speed things up & support the decisions affecting different tradeoffs. For example, raspberry pi’s are fucking garbage - so I’d be able to explain why it’s a waste of your time and money setting up lightning infrastructure & expecting it to be robust. 

Software wise, I’m using foss. Sure you can’t easily audit if I fucked with it, but I can easily make sure that you can replace the software yourself to avoid that. Proxmox is the right tool to use for this ime, and you should consider buying from me to pick up on how to use it, not to deploy a full trusted & robust stack right out of the gate. This should be like playing in the playground for most plebs. 

 I was going to zap dimi for the reply, but got a  "not set up to accept zaps" message!?!?
anyway,  I appreciate your response & perspective. 

#stack on!