

The part that got me is a single fork turning into billions of valid URLs, because every commit, diff and plain render is its own page. I run a small Gitea behind Nginx Proxy Manager, and a forge is exactly the kind of app where that math applies even at hobby scale. This has me checking whether anonymous visitors need the commit and diff views at all, or whether putting the web UI behind a login would cost me anything. Clones over git would still work for anyone who actually wants the code.
If the rest of the household mostly uses the apps themselves rather than the server, the OS underneath matters less than it seems. I run plain Ubuntu Server and manage the containers with Komodo, which I moved to from Portainer: it gives me a web UI to see, restart and update stacks, while the compose files stay ordinary files I can back up. Since you already back up your configs and YAML, keeping compose underneath means the next dead SSD is a reinstall and a redeploy, not a migration out of someone’s app store.