It's not uncommon on sites where a high proportion of the userbase uses an adblocker, as making ads look like and render using the same code as organic content (same CSS classes, etc) makes them harder to block.
Tech-savvy Lemmy users (and their friends) are a small portion of the population though. Plenty of people pay for cable TV, IPTV, or a similar service, and/or VOD platforms like Netflix.
Best Buy has been one of the best places to buy PC components like GPUs from (as long as they're in stock), since they don't mark up prices above the manufacturer's pricing, and they price match with Microcenter in case Microcenter's price is lower.
Autodiscovery needs DNS SRV entries to be added for each domain. The legacy Exchange- and Outlook-specific way was a file at /autodiscover/autodiscover.xml but I don't know if email clients still use that.
I have to ignore the certificate warning
I'm not familiar with Stalwart but you should be able to use Let's Encrypt certificates.
I self-host my emails, but use an SMTP relay for sending. IMO, the interesting part of self hosting email is the storage. Outbound sending is more complex and there's not as much benefit to self-hosting it.
I use Mailcow and have it configured to use a relay per domain. Email clients use the Mailcow server as their SMTP server, and Mailcow (well, Postfix) handles sending it to the appropriate relay.
A lot of people have an outdated view of the quality of stuff made in China. They think that everything is bad quality just because their $2 Aliexpress item doesn't last forever.
Most iPhones are made in China for example. Like anywhere, there's both good quality and bad quality products, depending on how much the company is willing to pay. Sometimes the quality is actually higher - for example, Tesla Model 3s manufactured in China have far fewer issues with road noise, panel alignment, and overall fit and finish compared to the ones manufactured in the USA. These days, China has far more experience with manufacturing, and a lot of the raw components (especially for electronics) come from China anyways.
Some companies that outsource manufacturing to China also lower their standards at the same time. It's not the manufacturing in China that's the problem; it's the company's decision to cheapen their product.
you can override this by setting an IP on the port exposed so thet a local only server is only accessable on 127.0.0.1
Also, if the Docker container only has to be accessed from another Docker container, you don't need to expose a port at all. Docker containers can reach other Docker containers in the same compose stack by hostname.
I'm running mine on a ~$33/year VPS at GreenCloudVPS. It's a small instance (just me) but it federates with all the major instances which means it still does a bunch of work (since it has to handle incoming posts and comments from federated servers). It's a decently powerful VPS with an AMD EPYC Milan CPU, 10GB RAM, and 100GB NVMe storage.
For a medium-sized instance, I imagine you could get pretty far with a single <$100/month dedicated server from Hetzner or a similar provider.
Some servers have ECC. If you get a cheap one (like a Hetzner auction server), it's less likely to have ECC. ECC protects against bitflips, but it won't help if the RAM is starting to die. ECC isn't magic - it just has an extra 8 bits of parity data per 64 bits of data. It still uses the same type of RAM chips.
It's not uncommon on sites where a high proportion of the userbase uses an adblocker, as making ads look like and render using the same code as organic content (same CSS classes, etc) makes them harder to block.