Is the server exposed to the internet at all? ie, Did you open a port on your firewall to allow inbound connections? If not, then nothing should be exposed to the internet and you should have no problem. Proton is also a vpn not a firewall and really doesn’t offer much protection against attacks. It basically just muddies the water on the origin of your Internet traffic.
Ah falling down the rabbit hole. If you’re only looking to transcode videos stay away from the graphics card. Look into Intel quick sync. Newer Intel cpus can transcode over a dozen 4k streams at a time using little power. However the next issue depends on what operating system you want to use, Windows, Linux, docker container or proxmox to run Plex/emby/jellyfin. They all come with their own issues/caveats to actually getting quick sync to work. However each is well documented. Learning is the fun part. I went down a similar route ended up with a nuc12pro running proxmox running a whole bunch of stuff but primarily used for Plex running in an lxc container. They are small powerful and don’t use a lot of power and importantly also well documented.
My best advice is start small. Try walking for 30 minutes and work your way up. The hardest part of working out is consistency. It doesn’t really matter what you do but just make sure you do something everyday. Dont let yourself make excuses. If you can form the habit of doing something everyday your 99% of the way there.