I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
I started out with an old laptop then eventually “upgraded” to a refurbished office surplus desktop. I highly recommend starting out on a project PC as a sort of proof of concept before investing any money into it. Even hosting the family media libraries, I have never had an issue with streaming video, etc. even with pretty dated hardware.
It depends, but probably. I use 5-10yo laptops running Debian.
If you already have one, it’s a good place to start. However, power efficiency will be the biggest drawback. Power ain’t free, and in some places it is very expensive. I’d recommend picking up some cheap ThirdReality switches and using them to monitor power consumption in Home Assistant.
Hardware requirements really depend on what you want to do with the server. I have a few raspberry pi, an old PC, and at least one or two old laptops to host things on. But really, I use the old PC the most. It pulls more power than a raspberry pi, but I’ve found it to be much more reliable and stable.
Drop some additional hard drives if you need a media server. More memory & CPU if you are doing things like manipulating images or transcoding video. I run a webserver and host various subdomains for things I don’t want to pay to host. Plus working samples of my portfolio projects. I keep my actual portfolio on cloudflare, but link out to these work samples.
I also host some other apps that are just for my home network. Everything works great on a 10 year old PC sitting in a network closet. You are very likely not in need of professional server hardware.
Heck yeah! Old desktops or laptops are how most of us got started.
Things to consider:
- Power- this will be on 24/7 probably. That adds up
- Speed- not just CPU, but RAM, disk access and network interface can limit how much data you want to move.
- Noise- fans can suck (pun intended). Laptops tend to run quieter
I’m sort of looking to upgrade and N100 or N150’s are looking good. Jellyfin can do transcoding so that takes a little grunt. This box would work well for me. It’s not a storage solution, but can run docker and a handful of services.
I wanted to echo this by saying that my lab stated as 4 bay Qnap NAS and evolved into repurposed consumer hardware as my interests and needs changed. My current server is an Optiplex that I bought for being small, quiet, and hanging lots of cores and my NAS is just my old gaming PC build with an HBA card (for extra SATA lanes) stuffed into a fancy case. A server is any computer that you say is a server (ideally one with functional network connectivity).
I’ve been running a plex server on an old desktop bought in 2016. Mostly streaming movies and tv shows to my family. I have a 2 TB SSD and a spare 2TB HDD. I was thinking about getting a mini PC to swap out the larger desktop. Could I get a larg HDD and ad it in an enclosure to the Mini PC to handle the media volume?
While laptop batteries may not have aged well, especially if they’re left discharged, one other nice perk is that laptops effectively have an integrated UPS.
