No argument there! I also had a 970 back when it was new. Upgraded to a 2070 and I am still on that one. The 970 was pretty great, even got two of them at one point, then found out how useless SLI was and gave it to my mother lol.

You dont really have to, but you would probably bottleneck a new card pretty badly if the cpu is from around the same timeframe as the 970

What makes you think they pay a monthly subscription? That is an uncommon and unnecessary part of running a plex server. Most would have either bought lifetime or stayed on the free version.

The timing! I just finished 5 hours of playing on my self hosted server with a friend of mine lol On ubuntu, I just needed java installed, download the git repo, then ran the run sh file. That was it. In the client you edit the config file to swap the public server address with your server’s ip and when you launch next, it will connect to yours.