The benefit of buying an R730 (I own two) is if you’ve literally never laid hands on a server before. You’ll learn things you didn’t know existed coming from the consumer world like management NICs, iDRAC, raid controllers, redundant power supplies, racks and rails, ECC memory, internal flash storage, etc. That is the value of purchasing a server.

Having said that, if you already know most of that stuff, absolutely do not buy an R730. They’re loud even with fans ramped down, they’re power hogs, they have a huge server depth so the space they take up is insane, and they’re crazy heavy and produce heat. There really is no advantage over a more modern desktop machine which you could still run ESXi on fine as long as you pick one with an intel NIC that’s compatible.

Cloudflare is just as secure and way more convenient. Possibly even more secure since that VPN is opening a port into your home where as cloudflare is not.

Cyber Security seems to bring out weird bravado where people pretend like they know more than they do. This thread is literally dozens and dozens of people spouting nonsense.

The bottom line is if you’re running a cloudflare tunnel with authentication on the tunnel itself to a trusted auth provider and then enable 2FA on that auth provider, you have a zero trust model that is about as secure as most modern companies. All of the people saying BUT WHAT ABOUT ZERO DAY are beyond dumb. Enable auto-updates on everything you can, script the rest. The chances of there being a zero day vulnerability to cloudflare and then a bot is able to hit your synology page which then has its own security they need to get past, it’s not likely at all. Monitor your Synology login attempts just in case it’s all built in.