Re: What kind of server would you recommend?
The Mac Mini would be better if it were the 2012 model, quad-core. But the current Minis are still pretty good if your server load will be predictable. Virtualisation is one thing that probably throws this calculation off though.
Yours is not a bad idea, SLJ, but I have two Mac Minis on my desk and only one of them runs macOS (the other runs Linux), and the Mac can't be remotely accessed unless I'm next to it and can hear the audio. If you ever figure out how to stream audio, great, but I haven't yet. So you end up with a keyboard and pair of headphones in hand, even though the Mac can indeed do many things as a server; mine is used just to serve iOS clients with the caching server and also handles network backups. Linux, of course, is God's gift to geeks with skill in the command line. Windows is fully accessible with Remote Desktop.
Running a VPS is nice, but it still has two fundamental problems: it's somebody else's computer, and laten cy. The first is a matter of philosophy: why pay over the odds for someone else to do your work for you? But it has advantages of scalability at the lower end and makes it much easier to experiment or add and remove VMs, even though it introduces possible privacy concerns as do all clouds. The other is much more practical: you can't run a NAS from the cloud, because a network storage box has to be on your own LAN, by necessity.
As somebody here has said, it would be nice to know what your exact needs are, so we can advise you on the simplest route. I'd suggest a Linux box on your LAN as well as a Mac Mini, but since you'll want Windows as well I'm thinking the Mac is still the better option as long as you're prepared to lose a little flexibility and remote manageability. Linux in theory provides everything you need, but you would have to do everything without a head, which is certainly possible but challenging for a novice, and realistically it's impossible to do certain things like run proprietary software logged in (such as iTunes or Arq, in my case).
HTH.
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