To add to this, could also be a cold or cracked solder joint making intermittent connection.
If you get desperate, you can look at reflow options. I know the old Xboxs people would bake. Best to just take a look at the solder joints for all the connectors. Are they still shiny? Or dull and cracked?
I believe Cloudflair tunnels is free. That’s where my comment was rooted.
I use a VPS, not Cloudflair, but it’s the exact same concept.
CF will have an exposed IP that you point your domains A record to. On your CF instance, you would then tunnel (I’m guessing they offer wireguard) into your home network, just like you are currently doing from your personal device.
A big difference here is you will put a reverse proxy on CF that will authenticate SSL with users. The proxy then will pass unencrypted http down the tunnel for your web services to respond to.
A couple days ago, someone asked (I think on this instance), “can you protect yourself from your VPS?”, which I think would be your next question.
<Opinion>I pay for a VPS, because if it’s free, you or your data is some how the product. </Opinion>
Just did the math out of curiosity. NVMe averages 4000mb/s (worst case) SATA averages 600mb/s (best case)
It would take about 7 disks to get nearly the same speeds.
Average 4TB NVMe seems to be about 200-250$ 8x cheap as dirt 512MB SSD seems to be about 240$
So if you do not have an NVMe slot on your old mobo but do have 8x spare SATA slots, you could get the same or .5 TB less of space at nearly the same speed, for nearly the same price. You would gain the added benefits of raidZ1 on ZFS, something NVMe on one slot does not give.
This also gets pretty interesting because those could be cheap 1TB disks and you now have 7-8TB of space for around 320$ (depending on raid)
I think it comes down to what kind of motherboard the user has and if they want raid for uptime/disaster recovery.
2006 Our Highschool had “recycled” some of the older machines and it started from there.
A Dell Optiplex GX1 500MHz, with 128mb of ram, and a 80gb IDE HHD. Installed Debian Sarge, This was running a dial-up gateway for our home network as well as samba.
It allowed one machine to be the LANs internet connection, abet slow. Samba was so I could download installers once, and then pull them from the network drive.
2008-2012 that machine was a dedicated WordPress machine. Around 2019 I pulled it out of the closet and powered it up. The whole site was there, still ran without a hiccup. It was actually recycled shortly after that, Dell used to make great hardware.