I use a Synology NAS in my house with Syncthing running on it (for Dropbox-like directory sync) and Wireguard running on my router so that when I'm remote I can tunnel in and access all my services that way rather than opening ports individually (also great for mobile device ad blocking via my pi-hole). I'm luckily not behind a CGNAT, so no external proxy is required—just dynamic DNS. It was a fair amount of work to set it all up but it works flawlessly now, and I had fun. :)

People who are really hardcore about data sovereignty would probably take issue with my choice of Synology, but you could roll your own if you prefer. Synology seems to have a decent record and reputation, and my experience with it has been pretty good overall.

For backup, I'm currently using Synology's proprietary thing to do snapshots to Backblaze, and mirroring all my critical stuff to various other places. I'm planning to set up a Restic backup for more redundancy (and a bit of obscurity), and I would also like to figure out a cold backup scheme for the whole NAS though I haven't thought very hard about that yet.

FWIW, if you’re looking to enter that space as simply and reliably as possible, I would pick up a Synology machine in whatever size you need. They have some competition but remain the best mix of stability in hardware/software/price imo.