Re: well personally
@petur - Maybe you should catch up with NAS vendor offerings before ranting....
So you agree with buying in a service, you just want something physcial at home (which still leaves all the issues over firewalls, back-ups, updates etc.) to give yourself a false sense of control and security.
"QNAP offers its own cloud portal (DDNS), directly set up and configured from your NAS."
Whoa. Stop right there. So this really isn't a home system at all, is it? You now have to 100% trust QNAP and be certain that they are not playing silly bastards with your data in-transit. It's no different to DropBox.
"Load balancing on a private system? Come on."
Perfectly legitimate. As is having a stand-by server running at another location in the event of a power cut. Which brings in concepts of high-availability. Something a user gets "for free" with DropBox but isn't trivial for the average person to do.
"QNAP firmware updates keep it secure. User only ticks the box to enable functionality."
Oh, so the user has to totally trust this magic software of unknown provenance. How is that *ANY* different to bunging it into DropBox? Clue: It isn't.
"One point you could make but forgot, is that some ISPs still block ports to prevent you from running a server"
No, I think you'll find that I did make that point. Trying reading what I wrote. Clue: "business-grade".
Your "hybrid" system is no different to the like of DropBox expect that it means more bother for the end-user. Whilst the media might be sat in your basement, you are still trusting a third party with all your data. You've changed the architecture, but not solved the problem.