In my extensive experience, use Zooz zen series for the bulk of your switches. Buy inovelli for special switches such as by your front door or anywhere you might want the use of the LED indicator strip and scenes.

Majority of other smart switches will give you issues with dimming flicker. Trust me, I’ve bought thousands of dollars of smart switches. Zooz and Inovelli are great choices.

My network is currently setup with wireguard. I have a VPS operating as a hub within a hub and spoke (or is it hub and wheel?) configuration. This has worked great with the exception that all traffic passes through the VPS. The benefit of a mesh network is that I can directly connect clients and data does not have to flow through an intermediary VPS.

Ideally I would be able to split tunnel around the vpn but I don’t have the option on mac

I tried to set up a nebula network but it seems like it has trouble when your hosts are behind a VPN service. The VPN must block the port or protocol the lighthouse is connecting with and I can’t figure out a way to bypass the VPN (at least on Mac split tunneling isn’t supported). I’m assuming you’re familiar with mesh networks…do you have any good youtube videos or resources you would recommend? The nice thing about VPN is it’s crazy simple to set up and seems to work with all types of system configurations. Nebula was pretty simple but seems like a pain to troubleshoot so far.

Funny you mention that. I was about to make a post about Nebula earlier. I learned about it through YouTuber apalrd a few months back and it seems perfect. I’m still trying to understand some of the complexities when utilizing a service that requires circumventing the mesh network for public access such as Nextcloud. I’ll probably make a post about this after I’ve done some more research. I think there’s some good discussion to be had about such a setup.

So each time I get shut down is during a large extended data transfer. I have my VPS server set up as a VPN hub that connects multiple servers. So typically when my traffic gets diverted to a black hole by DO, there was a consistent roughly 35MB/s inbound/outbound vpn traffic stream for 4-5 hours going through the VPS. My server gets shut down for 3-4 hours and I get a email notice that my server was under a massive DDoS attack and they diverted traffic to a black hole. I always respond informing them that it’s not a DDoS and explain the situation. They typically respond with “Utilize a service like Cloudfare which has DdoS protection”.

I’ve been really happy with them as a provider otherwise but this is a dealbreaker for me.

Thanks. I actually selfhost my backup server. So I’m not backing up to a VPS. I use the VPS as a hub in a hub and wheel configuration to connect multiple servers (including a dedicated backup server).

I appreciate your insight. That’s good to know. My journey into self hosting started with searching for alternatives to google products so I’m naturally hesitant to touch anything under their umbrella.

That’s pretty decent. I tried speed testing some other recommendations and I was seeing 35 MB/s.

Looks promising. Do you know what their network speeds are? I can’t seem to find that in their FAQs.

This looks great for privacy but their servers are hosted only in Sweden, which might be an issue since I’ll need good latency and high bandwidth.

I prefer to shy away from those companies, especially Google, for moral/privacy reasons.