@Ulrich @bdonvr Another alternative I could recommend that balances self-hosting and ease-of-use would be to perhaps acquire a Synology NAS.
I find that their OS is super user friendly and they have built-in alternatives to a lot of Google apps (email, docs, photos, drive, etc).
You still have to worry about potentially having an off-site backup, but they also have solutions for that in their OS's app store (for duplicating an entire NAS to a remote one for example).
@Ulrich @bdonvr It will indeed be hard to use Immich without some technical knowledge at the moment. The documentation explicitly warns that the software is changing fast and might break a few things.
I'm sure that some day they will have a paid hosted tier that will de-risk the technical aspects such as backups and resilience but thats not here yet.
Perhaps you could take a look at Ente Photos for a non-Google, privacy friendly (and encrypted) photo hosting solution.
https://ente.io/
@Ulrich @bdonvr I use a Synology DS220+ myself with a few TBs of hard disks. I regret not having bought another model with more disk bays but thats another story. :)
Although I'm a developer and I could handle it all myself, I also don't want to complexify my setup more than it needs to.
Partly because I have other things to do but also because there is a pretty big risk factor that's not entirely clear when you're in charge of your own infrastructure and backups and all that.