virt-manager for qemu. I also did some cloud init script with LLM to have a nice way of spinning up new vms with a server user, ssh and my access keys. VMs have also on big advantage. It’s easy to back up entire qcow2 disk image and then if necessary move entire VM to a different host.

I personally go with VMs. Except of some services that I run on Hetzner.

I got one Debian server that runs multiple VMs with tailscale. Then one Hetzner VPS with Caddy. This one acts as a public gateway.

Some things are still running bare metal, like Immich or Jellyfin because of apple hardware. However the level of entropy I have now is th opposite of all eggs in on basket. I sometimes forget what do I have where and have to look it up in my docs.