I believe you don’t get Shadowplay without it, so if you need game recording / replay without impacting performance it’s worth installing. But I would recommend the nvidia app beta instead of geforce experience as it doesn’t require a login.

Other than that you don’t get any optimizations by installing geforce experience, other than its game settings tuner thing which doesn’t work at all.

Gotcha, mine always seems to be 1GB of space usage on all my PCs so I figured that was just the default.

Yes, don’t expose Windows to the internet

It sounds like they’re just exposing a game server, not windows.

Yep, every browser has a browser cache, I believe in Firefox it’s set to 1GB by default? It will cache assets like JS or images on the same domain name.

Quality of their products maybe? Cloudflare feels like they put a lot of effort into their product, Google not so much with how buggy everything is and how often they just abandon products they offer.

Getting DDOSed or hacked is very very rare for anyone self hosting. DDOS doesn’t really happen to random people hosting a few small services, and hacking is also rare because it requires that you expose something with a significant enough vulnerability that someone has a way into the application and potentially the server behind it.

But it’s good to take some basic steps like an isolated VLAN as you’ve mentioned already, but also don’t expose services unless you need to. Immich for example if it’s just you using it will work just fine without being exposed to the internet.