Hi friends. I’m a newbie in self-hosting, though I’ve been managing (virtual) linux servers at work for a couple of years. I’m completely ignorant on the hardware choices out there, hopefully you can point me to the right direction.
Here are my requisites:
- Low power consumption, I plan to have it connected 24/7 and I’m kinda concerned on how much it will impact the electricity bill
- Ethernet port, preferably gigabit but whatever
- Graphical performance is not important as I don’t plan to connect it to any display. As long as I can ssh into it, I’m good.
Services I plan on installing, for starters:
- casaOS
- pi-hole, or equivalent
- Home Assistant
- Kitchen Owl (nice to have)
- Paperless-ngx (nice to have)
I live in europe and my budget is around 80 euros or so. Thanks in advance!
Not to state the obvious one, but there’s always the Raspberry Pi.
The supply has gotten better on those, so you can probably pick one up in your price range, and the power draw is super minimal.
Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/
Alternatively, there are also some options from pine64.com, maybe scroll through there! Same for odroid.nl
That reminds me, I do own a pine64 device! It was the first thing I got on Kickstarter.
It’s a Pine A64, with 2gb RAM. I wonder if it has enough power to run all those things. It’s a budget device from 8 years ago, probably gonna have a hard time but I’ll give it a try if I manage to find it!
If it’s been a while since you checked, it’s worth checking again. RPi has been becoming more available over the last month or two, and I was able to get one of the new RPi 5!
Someone put together a great locator tool
A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.
A used Android pixel phone. You can root it and install Pideploy and run PiHole through it.
I have an old Pixel 3a doing exactly this. The other services I don’t quite know if they have an Android implementation.
Doesn’t suit your every use case, but I figured I’d share.
termux-root has a docker package. That still doesn’t cover everything but a lot of popular services have docker images
At around 80 euros then for lowest power you should go Raspberry Pi, for most performance while still being low power an old business laptop is fine, and since you don’t need the screen you can buy one with a broken screen.
Risking sounding like a broken record, I always suggest Tiny/Mini/Micro 1L form factor office PCs. Lenovo, Dell, and HP all create ultra small office PCs that make great low power servers. A Pi will use 5-9w at idle, while these PCs will use 11-13w idle. They also use more standard components such as NVME drives, 2.5" drives, and replaceable RAM. Easy to find under $100 USD used, I’m sure you can find them under 100 euro.
SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.
USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.
SBC = Single Board Computer.
Good point.
The Pi Zero is 2w max… It’s downside is it draws 2w MAX. Power is power, only so much you can do in 2w. As you pointed out, the 4 and 5 can do more, because they can draw more, (or they draw more so can do more, it’s all related).
The key seems to be ability to minimize the idle power while still capable of ramping up to something useful when you need it - like the micros you’ve listed.
