I ran into this exact problem with my commercial mini rack. I ended up 3d printing my own rack and have lattice sides that allow the air to flow out. I originally did exactly what you did with the fans in front. (excuse the cable chaos behind, I'm installing 3D-printed OpenGrid panels on the wall to cleanly mount the power supplies and cable runs.) With the front fans I could keep my MS-A2 around 67°. Now, with the open sides and side push through cooling, it hovers around 58°

@Robert Schwanz Same here. I've setup 3 small'ish VPS instances at RackNerd (between $35 to $45 per year) and as I start relying more and more on whatever tech stack I'm testing, there are some that just make sense to put out there for more availability. Plus, that reduces those requirements on my on-prem homelab which lets me learn new things. As Brandon and others have stated, I believe this trend is going to have those of us in this area learn how to do more with the same (don't want to say less).

I had a full 19" rack in my basement stuffed full of servers back in the 2000's....slowly downsized over the last 2 decades. Not hosting less 'stuff', just taking advantage of the power of the new mini-pc's and NAS appliances. I bought a DeskPi 10" rack last year, but alas it was still cooking my 3-node Proxmox cluster. I've recently printed out a 10" rack on my new 3D printer that has more ventilation options. Still needing to relocate everything into it. Here's the current rats nest. I've also printed a bunch of OpenGrid mounts for the back wall where I'll do all my power brick/cord management. (Anyone want to buy a used 10" 5U DeskPi rack?)

@Brandon Lee yea, they're just too small to stuff a UPS into. I have seen some small ones but they'll only give you 5 to 10 minutes of runtime. I have 3 Cyberpower 1500VA UPS units sitting on a top shelf and they're spread across one for my Synology NAS and old HP Micro server running TrueNAS, one that powers my Proxmox nodes, Raspberry Pi's and the switch/KVM in the rack and the third UPS handles all the PoE switches and misc lights/fans. Shortest battery runtime for my network is 180 minutes. I also have another two identical UPS units over where my internet comes in and powers those switches, the comcast business router and my firewall.

I've done all of those (except 4 - CEPH) in the last 12 months. I'm currently using NFS storage on my Synology (dual 10GB nic) for my Proxmox storage as the mini-PC's I have only support 1 internal nvme drive. I originally had 2x2TB USB3 SSD drives on each node, but CEPH was such a memory hog (I know..it releases as needed) but all my alerting was thrown off on the hosts and I just didn't like those external usb SSD's hanging off. For my use, I'm ok with NFS mounts.

of course the downside to NFS mounts is that for HA to work, the VM has to restart if it's migrated to another host..

Been using Opnsense for about 2 years now on a fanless pc (Intel(R) Celeron(R) N5105 @ 2.00GHz (4 cores, 4 threads) that supports 4x2.5gb nics. I migrated to this when my Comcast Business line went to 1gb speeds and my old EdgeRouter X couldn't handle the speeds. I also wanted to implement Geo-blocking since I expose quite a few services to the public but only need US based connections and that alone slashed outside probing quite a bit. I haven't used many of the plugins other then moving my DHCP service from my ActiveDirectory servers to Opnsense firewall. It's been pretty much a set it and forget it system for me that doesn't require a lot of babysitting like firewalls I've run over the past few decades.