In regards to media, how do others manage this ? Can this be offloaded to Amazon S3 or another cloud storage ? I am mindful of disk space if members upload lots of pictures etc.
Unless you are running anything else on that server that can't run PHP 7.4, go with just 7.4.
My preference is MariaDB 10.3.24.
Make sure these options are all available. These are my preferences but this is on a dedicated server. The settings would likely be different for a VPS.
Also, for iMagick. you need to enable that for Apache but also for PHP. Both.
PHP version 7.4.10
MySQL version 10.3.24 (10.3.24-MariaDB)
PHP memory_limit -1
PHP post_max_size 128M
PHP upload_max_filesize 64M
PHP max_input_vars 1000
PHP max_execution_time 90
cURL version 7.72.0
cURL SSL version OpenSSL/1.1.1h
OpenSSL version OpenSSL 1.1.1h 22 Sep 2020
Suhosin enabled No
Imagick support Yes
EXIF support Yes
GZip support Yes
mbstring support Yes
gmp support Yes
ZipArchive support Yes
