Tried remote storage and its slow like you mention, but once I ran it on a ryzen desktop with a hdd for storage the whole thing is incredibly fast and works great.
Hmmm, I have a small BuyVM Ryzen-based KVM vm (I think lives on local SSD storage but can’t remember) that’s been idling for quite some time— might have to give it a whirl, thanks.
I use it over gigabit fios and get 68MB/sec transfer speeds to/from my nextcloud instance at home. I don't usually get that much with google drive/etc...