Like many here I also run a few things at home and I've got a variety of machine: a good old Pi as an unbound DNS server that is on 24/7, A N100 modern NUC, running headless, to stream movies/music (wife or kid or I turn it on when needed), a good old rock stable solid HP Z440 workstation which I use as a server (ECC RAM and 14 cores, yummy) for Proxmox/VMs/Docker/ZFS, etc.

The workstation which I use as a server is only powered up when I need it.

> I used Syncthing for file synchronization and PiHole as my local network DNS server to block unwanted incoming traffic.

Nitpicking but a local DNS resolver doesn't block unwanted incoming traffic: it prevents unwanted domain names from resolving. Arguably if it blocks traffic then it's ongoing traffic that it blocks.

Maybe he meant that the machine running PiHole also runs a firewall? I use unbound, not PiHole, so I'm not that familiar with PiHole (maybe PiHole also acts as a firewall?).

Pihole now includes an unbound setup, they have a section on that in their docs.