Sure, let’s just gloss over the cost of heating - which relies heavily on fossil fuels or smog-producing fuels, or both.

Datacentre thermal management (especially for AI)isn’t even in the same ballpark as cooling for homes. One produces pretty charts for management, the other keeps people alive.

They’re there, but harder to find. And some are closing. I’ve had two or three in the last couple years that closed, in the reasonably popular world of cars.

That’s the problem isn’t it? We used to have forums where people discus things and blogs where people share what they’ve learned, now it is all Reddit and discord and absolute trash in between.

What sort of isp supplied residential equipment doesn’t block inbound connections? Pedantically, you’re correct.

You have a firewall. It’s in your router, and it is what makes it so that you have to VPN into the server. Otherwise the server would be accessible. NAT is, effectively, a firewall.

Should you add another layer, perhaps an IPS or deny-listing? Maybe it’s a good idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception

Federal law allows certain federal agents to conduct search and seizures within 100 miles (160 km) of the border into the interior of the United States.[5] The Supreme Court has clearly and repeatedly confirmed that the border search exception applies within 100 miles (160 km) of the border of the United States

There’s no first or fourth amendment rights within 100 miles of the border of the USA. Probably other missing rights too.

This is good advice, but I think Roblox is a game marketplace/platform, which makes that more difficult. It’s a harder sell to explore the social features as a family than a game.

Well yes, it is one hop, because you’ve got the router doing TLS termination. Inside your network you point to the server that has the TLS certs. Outside of the network you do port forwarding, or use a tunnel with cloudflare agents.

Why is the router involved at all? It’s all local traffic. The external traffic comes through the cloud flare tunnel, right? Maybe I’m not understanding the architecture you’ve got.

It’s possible but it’s an extra pain in the butt.

Internally, have you tried pointing the DNS directly to the ngnix server, not the router? There’s no reason to have that extra hop (I don’t think).

If you are establishing a TLS connection to a server, the server will need a certificate. It sounds like you’re trying to have two instances of a reverse proxy - one on the server, and one on the router. It may be my ignorance of the particulars, but my immediate thought is that you should select one point in the network to do reverse proxying.

What brand are those power strips? Last time I went shopping for power strips, they were all the rage and I could hardly find one WITHOUT that feature. Today, several years later, I can’t find any. Except, perhaps, some Chinese ones without safety approvals. I need one for my tv.