Ah its not so bad if you get so drunk your critical thinking skills go out the window.

Oh I’m fully aware I’m just to lazy to set up jellyfin and navidrome quite yet.

I’d strongly recommend reverse proxy, some sort of security like crowd sec or fail2ban and sperate auth (authelia, aithentik) in front of anything you’re opening to the internet. Just opening services directly up to the internet is choice I’d politely describe as brave.

Sure but this won’t work if you’re accessing services outside your network like OP is doing. You’re going to need publicly available DNS records somewhere to do that.

I don’t believe pihole functions as an authorative DNS server though. Something like technetium does and they could be used as the nameservers for a domain while still offering all the same adblocking functionality that pihole does.

Though pihole could work of you were relying on a VPN to access your stuff remotely.

You can set up automatic renewals for domains.

What’s you use case here? If you just need more ports for data drives and have a free pcie slot a used SAS HBA cards and use breakout cables to give you a bunch more data ports. These are very durable cards.