We have a few things hosted at smikbox, so using TS-682-i3 with 4 x 8GB disk, 2xSSD and 2xSSDm3 cache. We need the horsepower to run all the servers.

e.g. We are hosting 5 live WordPress sites, plus several backup sites for Live domains hosted externally. That way if these external sites goes down we can swap to the backup very quickly. The WordPress Duplicate plugin allows us to create a mirror image of any site as a backup on the NAS and bring that site up just the same as it was externally very quickly (great for Testing, QA and debugging).

Plus we run multiple Windows 2xxx instances, multiple Windows PC, a PC farm used for SEO.a few unbuntu servers one of which runs home-Assistant and controls home automation in my home and the office.

So generally the TVS-682-i3 is pretty busy.

With so much at stake it does backup and replication to a separate TS-453a (custom unit with 16GB of memory) in separate location, plus critical backups to a friends QNAP TVS-682-i3. The TS-453a is special custom unit because it also runs several VM’s for specific SEO tasks.

Plus we replicate to external sites and Google Drive, Dropbox and a few others. Generally it sounds like a lot but it just built up over time.

Hope that helps.

These results searched a 3TB volume in seconds ..!

http://prntscr.com/d4f3ef

Very convenient !

Some of the immediate benefits are:
1) If your needing to perform tasks on a PC as if you were in the same office or using a PC on a local network setting up a Windows VM is a good idea.
2) Once the NAS is installed, you can connect to your NAS using HTTP for admin, but the Virtualzation station needs additional modem configuration to allow you to use it from the QTS NAS admin console when working remotely. Further to this you cant get access to routers, switches, Camera’s, printers, iOT devices from an external HTTP interface without going to a lot of time and effort setting up the router to allow external access.
Additionally your exposing your network a little more each time you open seldom used ports for administrative functions. Windows for all it’s failures is still secure enough for most people, and using a PC to then open a Web browser from inside the firewall to perform admin functions is a simpler solution. You have just one point of entry that is easier to secure, supervise and monitor.
3) If you want a generic PC to share amoungst people to perform simple tasks, a Virtual PC is great. e.g. an internet marketing tool with only one login account that gets data from social accounts, and is shared amoungst a number of people in the office.
4) If you want to test software downloaded from a site your unfamiliar with, just clone a PC and test it. If it fails or corrupts that virtual PC, you can just delete that damaged PC.
5) If your intending to use PC software that uses a lot of graphics and local processing a Windows 10 VM is a good choice.
6) If you have the potential for many people to login and use Windows, if using separate PC’s each PC will need 2GB of memory or more. In that case a Windows server, with for example 2-4GB of memory can accommodate more users within the same memory that would be possible using a separate PC for each person.

Solution:
http://serverfault.com/questions/639088/how-do-i-make-a-connection-private-on-windows-server-2012-r2

Both these companies are reputable manufacturers that provide good quality products, I would use either in my equipment without concern.

In the end its more a matter of using which ever your most comfortable with, and if your unfamiliar go for best price / performance value.

One point I would make regarding photo collections, is that since a photo once stored on a drive remains in that location is not altered or changed, so disk performance is not as critical for this environment. So when choosing a drive the Western Digital RED are 5400 rpm, and are adequate for storage of large files. Typically the WD RED PRO are 7200 rpm and considerably faster for read / write, but in your case the usage is more write once, and read many times, so the standard WD RED 5400 rpm will be suitable.

If your running a website or blog for personal use on ADSL, we have found the 500KB/s upload is satisfactory for 10 out of 30 days in a month. Some pages (especially those using a log of plugins) may at times take a little long to load (1-2 seconds to respond, but 10 seconds to finish loading all the images, scripts, Facebook pixels, Google Tags) so there are speed issues. However looking at Google Analytics for a site running from ADSL, I see this slow performance as an infrequent even for a small blog site receiving less that 500 visits a day, and those visitors inconvenienced by slow response are few and far between (e.g. 1or 2 a week may abandon (or Cntrl-F5 and try again) due to upload speed.

So perhaps optimizing front page load speed might be cheaper than upgrading to cable ?

I know this is not a complete answer but I hope it helps with your decisions.

Each of these Virtual sites could be WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or any of the other add on applications provided with QNAP QTS.

Under the covers its the Apache server reverse proxy that is doing the work, but the QNAP management console shields from all this.

The documentation at https://www.qnap.com/en-au/tutorial/con_show.php?op=showone&cid=16 is fairly self explanatory, and we have used it many times without a glitch.

The only variation being that if your running a Virtual host using Virtualization, you will need to make alterations the the /etc/config/apache.conf/extras/.. files to make it redirect to another IP address. This more advanced configuration is provided as a part of the smikbox service, and outside the scope of this topic.