It does have quite a bit of overhead, meaning it’s not the fastest out there, but as long as it’s fast enough to serve the media you need, that shouldn’t matter.
Also, you need to either mount it manually on the command line whenever you need it or be comfortable with leaving your SSH private key in your media server unencrypted. Since you are already concerned with needing to encrypt file share access even in the local network, the latter might not be a good option to you.
The good part about it is, as long as you can ssh from your media server to your NAS, this should just work with no additional setup needed.
This is on Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, so well within the 5 year window. I’m complaining because I kept getting frantic calls from people using that who didn’t know what was going on.
Pro tier is for Enterprise customers who need extra-long term support and are willing to pay for it. Canonical is meeting a market demand so they can remain competitive for use in those environments, which is good for everyone. It’s benign
Then please show me the button (and I mean button, not command-line exclusive settings or config file entries in /etc, and certainly not unofficial trickery like third party repositories that replace Ubuntu advantage packages with an empty decoy) that says “Thank you, I don’t need Ubuntu Pro, please stop nagging me about it”.
Depends a lot on what kind of user. I specified “non-technical” with a reason. I have, in the past, recommended Ubuntu to a small number of friends and family members. These are people who aren’t particularly comfortable using computers in the best of times. They very much don’t need the newest, best and most shiny versions of everything. They need to do billing, taxes, correspondance, email and various other tasks related to their small business, they need that to work reliably, and if at all possible, to work exactly the same way as it did the last five years. And if there is any pop-up they don’t immediately understand (for example because it’s in English instead of their native language, yes that still happens in Ubuntu quite a bit), they will call me on the phone.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had to support non-technical end-users, but for some of them, even something as seemingly trivial as a menubar that has moved from the top to the side can be issue that needs explaining and training. For that kind of user, I really do want to postpone all updates beyond pure bug and security fixes for as long as reasonably possible. Five years sounds reasonable. Six months does not.
And constant non-optional pop-ups nagging you to upgrade to Ubuntu Pro during those five years. I’d actually be kinda okay with it if it were only after, an if just as a reminder that, hey, the LTS period is over, you need to switch to the next LTS release now.
They do, including those that are in Debian, but they also have an additional source of faster security updates developed in house, which they hold back from the free path in favor of the pro package.
Personally, I feel a bit torn about this. On the one hand, this should be, officially at least, purely an additional service on top of what’s available in the baseline distro, and isn’t taking anything away from that.
On the other hand, I strongly disagree with holding back security fixes from anyone, ever, for any reason. Also, the claim that it will never take away anything from the free base distro is at least a little bit suspect. I would not be surprised if the existence of the pro path were to gradually erode the quality and timelyness of the base security upgrade path over time. Also, Ubuntu is now very annoying about nagging you to upgrade to pro, and the way to disable that is fairly involved and very much non-official. The whole thing goes against what I expect from a F/OSS operating system. I don’t quite understand why this topic hasn’t been a much bigger issue in Linux circles yet. It certainly doesn’t sit right with me…
In your case, instead of getting a dedicated server and putting proxmox on it, I would check if it might not be cheaper to just get individual virtual servers directly.
Other than that, sure, I have been a customer for many years now, and I have always been a fan of Hetzner’s price to quality ratio.