I know in an ideal world I should split off data and mail onto two different servers. Very aware of what good looks like.

My challenge is cost. It's a community website which does not make a huge amount of cash so splitting it all will go from breaking even to a cost.

Should I strive for perfect or is good-enough good enough?

So for the longest while I've been using alexa for the advanced functions of "alexa, play music from Spotify" and "alexa, set a 5 minute timer".

With the swirling rumours that alexa will soon be a paid for device, it's time to test my other skills.

I want to build my own speaker cabinets (small, sonos size) and have them dotted around the house. Super simple.

Except - what are some good players / streamers people are using? I see balena-sound mentioned quite a bit. Thoughts? Something else?

I fundamentally don't want to sign up to sonos and have yet-another cloud service which can change.

I have a HP microserver gen 8 with 4 x 4TB disk in running truenas. I also have a cluster of PIs and a couple of dell 3050m for "compute". I don't run any services on the NAS.

I want more, faster storage consisting of m.2s or ssd sata.

Should I build my own (absolutely don't mind and enjoy it) or just roll with one of the large qnap jobbies which offer both 2.5 and 3.5.

I appreciate it's a "what are you comfortable with" question.... Is dropping a lot of money on qnap silly? More for money DIY route?