How should I design my home services infrastructure?

I’m relatively new to self hosting and home networking, and I’d like to get advice on the best practices.

Currently my gaming PC is also the host of all of my services and it runs Windows 11. I run Jellyfin and all the accommodated services (*arr services and a Usenet client) in a docker, and home assistant in a VMware player. I have no security, backups or scalable design.

I don’t have the money to spend on a NAS or any other hardware, so everything needs to be kept alongside my gaming PC.

1. Hosting - I’ve been thinking about maybe I can install Portainer as the OS of my gaming PC, install Windows 11 inside it and then install Jellyfin (and all it’s other services) and home assistant alongside my Windows 11, instead of installing them inside containers and VMs inside windows. I have no idea if that, or something similar is even an option, it’s 100% something I know nothing about and would like advice.

2. Tunneling - I’m wondering what’s the best practices that are common within the community regarding home VPNs like NordVPN MeshNet or WireGuard. I’m looking to create a layer of security + open the option for remote connections to my services outside my network, I’ve played around with WireGuard (but failed, would probably need to invest a lot more time). How do you tunnel your home services inside your network and outside? Keep in mind I need this to possibly match the solution I’ll go with in stage 1.

3. Encryption - what sort of security measurement do you guys use for your files and how do you set it up? I’ve been thinking about using something like VeraCrypt but I’m wondering if there’s some community standard I should know of. This question is about both files on disk, data in memory and through the networking (I.e. https?).