my last experience with it was a half empty documentation, and a config structure that signaled to me that they dropped a lot of features for v2 release that they initially wanted to have, which has additionally made understanding their config structure harder. and that hasn’t improved for years.

The funnel exposes your local services to the public over https . Like what you want to accomplish with reverse proxy .

they did not say they want it public, and that’s an additional security burden they may not need

if you don’t want to rent a domain, but you run a local DNS server (pihole, technitium) for filtering or other reasons, you can register your own domain names in there, for free. but don’t use common TLDs to avoid conflicts, and leave “.local” alone too because that’s used by mdns/avahi. You may use .home, .lan, or a few others I don’t know without looking them up

tailscale is not the same as nginx or any reverse proxy, though. I don’t expose anything publicly, but I still wouldn’t stop using a reverse proxy

8 GB RAM or more. OS installed either to SSD, or a HDD that does not store service data (for performance). a modern CPU with at least 4 cores. modern means it has at least AES and AVX2 instruction sets to do math quickly, but probably you can just pick one made in the last 10 years, with less years generally meaning better energy efficiency.

what kind of services do you want to host on it? initial plans, perhaps longer term plans?