My servers (an old desktop overstuffed with drives and an old dell laptop), networking gear and a 50 gal aquarium all run on the same outlet. As long as the aquarium heater is off, the outlet pulls about 200 watts. The aquarium heater spikes that to 400 watts when it kicks in.

Might check out Paperless-ngx. I know it has full text search. It OCRs everything you put in it. Not sure about integrating it with Wordpress though.

Why do you need it to be in a Wordpress page? I can’t quite see what you’re trying to accomplish.

You can certainly build a box for for use as a router, but you don’t need to.

If your not planning to build out anything public facing and aren’t going to run ipv6 internally, you can use any router to block all inbound ports and run everything over wire guard or tailscale.

There are a million and one ways to self host services. First question needs to be, what do you want to do and why. That will dictate the how.

Before I discovered VLC (some 20 years ago) I used to use mplayer. Not sure if it’s still being maintained though. It could display video using text output, frambuffer as well as via an x window.