TPM solves a sigthly different threat model: if you dispose the hd or if someone takes it out from your computer it is fully encrypted and safe. But if someone steals your whole server it can start and decrypt the drive. So you have to trust you have good passwords and protection for each service you run. depending on what you want to protect for this is either great solution or sub optimal
I use https://mycorrhiza.wiki/ it is not very fancy but it is a single executable file and stores pages in a git repository, so no database is needed and doing the export is as simple as reading some files.
I use rclone, which is essentially rsync for cloud services. It supports encrypion out of the box.
I tried a few and eventually settled on commafeed. It has categories, can be executed from a single docker image (in other words, can run without the hassle of an external database), and the responsive UI works well both on pc and phone.
The advantage of wildcard certificates is that you don't have to expose each single subdomain over internet. Which is great if you want to have https on local only subdomains.
Yes, you are right, I already use DNS validation. But it is just it is easier to request a single wildcard certificate for my domain and have all the subdomains that I use for the local services defined only in my local DNS. I cannot fully automate the certificate renewal because namecheap requires to allowlist the IP that can call its API, and my ip is dynamic. So renewing a single certificate saves me time. Also, the wildcard certificate is installed on a single machine, so it is not the I increase a lot the attack surface by not having different certificates for each virtual host.
I remember this blog post (I cannot find right now) where the person split the decryption password in two: half stored on the server itself and half on a different http server. And there was an init script which downloaded the second half to decrypt the drive. There is a small window of time between when you realize that the server is stolen and when you take off the other half of the password where an attacker could decrypt your data. But if you want to protect from random thieves this should be safe enough as long as the two servers are in different locations and not likely to be stolen toghether.
https://shadowsocks.org/ should be a good option, easy to install, encrypted, and password protected
The main storage is a Nas that is mounted in read only most of the time and has two drives in raid mirror. Plus rclone to push a remote and client side encrypted backup to backblaze.
I use backblaze and rclone to encrypt and sync. It was the cheapest and most flexible solution when I checked a few years ago and I didn't find any reason to change it so far
For a simple dynamic DNS, I have been using https://www.duckdns.org/ for a few years and been happy so far