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?
My current server runs 40ish docker containers and has 24TB of disk space in a ZFS array.
It is a 11 year old Intel chip and mobo that was my desktop once upon a time. I have been thinking about updating it simply because of power draw, but it works just fine.
I did add in PCI risor boards to get PCI 3.0 NVME drives in there.
It’s pretty common practice to upgrade your computer and turn your old one into a server. Then continue that cycle every upgrade.
I started with an old and half-broken laptop. Keyboard war busted.
Worked fine for months, then choosed to upgrade because I started hosting jellyfin and the laptop was unable to transcode on the fly…
You are fine with whatever hardware you have lying around… You can always grow later
Keep an eye for energy consumption tough… Too old stuff might be less efficient running 24/7 depending on your kW/h cost.
I just got a great Jellyfin+*arr setup running off of an old PC. Let me know if you need a hand
This was maybe 2-3ish years ago;
I started with a raspberry pi 4 bundle from Amazon, played around with the Linux filesystem, bash shell, APT package manager and just kept reinstalling the headless Debian 12 OS if I believed to have bricked it beyond repair.
Eventually learned about the Docker Engine & Docker Compose and that essentially gave access to a plethora of software I would’ve have never have used before.
The raspberry pi 4 started to show sluggishness as I started piling more and more services on it so, Instead of buying traditional server grade hardware I liked the small form factor of the Pi so I opted for a 13th gen Asus Nuc with an 12 core i7.
Everything runs beautifully now and I even run Debian 12 on my desktop as well!
I’m running my Proxmox VE on a small asus mini pc with embedded cpu. It can’t even match a 5 year old i3 and I’m having no issues.
Running mainly containers and small projects
