Comment by jabroni_salad

1.get a cheap used miniPC from ebay

2. Buy a relevant dongle/antenna for the protocol you want to use. I recommend the ones from Sonoff or from the Home Assistant foundation (I started with the sonoff for zigbee, but added the ZBT-2 for matter/thread. they are both good)

3. install proxmox to the metal.

4. use tteck's install script to make the HAOS vm. Don't make the containers, make the HAOS VM specifically: https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/#home-assistant-os-vm

5. Plug in your dongle(s) and don't forget to assign them to the new VM. You should now be able to start using home assistant. If you're using zigbee, choose zigbee2mqtt rather than ZHA, it's more reliable overall.

My setup is around 2 years old and I haven't had to administrate it at all.