In my experience, they come in waves. They come either as data centres seek to replace or renew existing drives, but as a result, there aren’t as many lower capacity drives available. Lately, I’ve only seen 10+TB drives under a recertified banner, though you can find lower capacity drives that are “refurbished” instead. They will have the power-on hours to match though, as these are the refuse from those sorts of drive replacements.

You may find better luck with local used marketplaces if you only need cheap storage. Otherwise, they do seem less common if you don’t need large capacity drives.

Echoing the sentiment of the other commenter. A link would be great!

Ah, I see where I got confused. Yeah, CGNAT isn’t very common around here. I don’t think I’ve ever run into an ISP that uses it. I can see how that complicates things.

You really don’t though. I use wireguard myself under the same scenario without issue. You just need to use some form of dynamic DNS to mitigate the potentially changing IP. Even if you’re using Tailscale you’ll still need to have something running a service all the time anyways, so may as well skip the proxy.

Oh yeah, at the time there was no support for my current registrar. It was a fun enough project to put my own script together anyways.

This is probably not what you’re looking for, but I found registering a cheap domain name and using a dynamic DNS script that checks every hour or so against your public IP to be a good way to mitigate issues. It also depends on your ISP. Mine typically only renews upon a reboot of the modem or a new PPPoE authentication.

Others have also suggested Tailscale, and I think that’s also a worthwhile option. It’s a pretty easy thing to set and forget, working like any oher VPN client. This is the least complex option to navigate, and if Plex was the only service you were forwarding then it’s likely the best option.

Because you’re serving the website on a non-standard port, you will always need to provide the port in the web browser.

That said, I don’t see anything wrong here. It looks like you’ve got the right ports set, TCP should be correct. You may not get a ping, because ICMP is likely not enabled at the modem. When you ping, you ping the first device that’s exposed to the internet, not an open server.

Just to be sure, when you’re on your phone, you’re using data? If you’re on wi-fi, the modem/router may not be configured to perform NAT reflection, so you won’t be able to access anything via your WAN IP.

It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they’ve pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that’s a fair argument still.

Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone’s mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don’t blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.