As a german citizen: Good luck, and welcome to germany! Hope you have a great time here. There are many very very beautiful small towns which don’t costs much, but are usually still in the vicinity of larger cities. So you usually, if you plan correctly, you get the pro’s of both. Beautiful small historic city and if wanted the buzz of a big city withing an hour’s drive. Cheers!

+1 for Fractal Define R5 - Absolute Beast

I have no experience with the docker container, but optimization for the database and nginx/apache cacheing must be made individually depending on number of cpu cores, ram-size, etc etc etc. When overtuning for example your database it can happen that you run out of RAM, which means your system will crash or freeze. Happened to me. I run it “Baremetal” and configured it “the classic way”. Tbh, after those optimizations it runs really, really fast and response times are really quick.

There are more twerks to it than "just’ using mariadb and redis. Maybe look into Apache/nginx cacheing,tune your mariadb settings and stuff like that. Had performance-problems with my owncloud-instance, now it runs like a champ