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I believe a lot of the inter workings were AWS based… maybe someone knows more about it, but I remember that being a non-starter for me

Lots of details from the 2018 Ars Technica review https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...

Is it a home cloud server like NextCloud but comes with the hardware?

Yes, somewhat. It started as email -only, but then later added NextCloud file services. The hardware is passively cooled, so nice and quiet.

Although I'm sad that the system is going to shut down, I'm glad that they are doing the right thing and are going to let me move the domain name I have to some other service.