As others have pointed out,

1. a VPN (so that your outbound traffic comes from your VPN endpoint, not your bare IP address)
2. a reverse proxy server

I use a router from GL-iNet to run the always-on VPN, and rathole for a reverse proxy. Both the VPN and the reverse proxy terminate at $4/mo VPSes.

It really kind of depends on your luck with the hardware. I’ve used laptops as servers for durations of several months at various points in the past and had no particular problems, just make sure cooling is adequate.

You might consider setting up a Proxmox node if you’re interested in virtualization at the machine level (i.e. having several virtual machines running on one physical machine, which can reduce maintenance headaches and make experimentation easier as VMs can be snapshotted, cloned, and easily replaced)

If they ever sell out

Already happened.

I love little ARM SBCs but my self-hosting journey accelerated drastically when I gave in and started using 8yo x86 hardware instead.

A couple rounds of upgrades later and I can also see how much more compute/$ one gets out of x86 as well. Even relatively recent PC hadware is absolutely dirt cheap used.

not the one you were replying to, but I’m 2/3 thru switching my servers over to the 1L form factor and am liking it. it’s amazing how much compute can be crammed into a tiny space these days.

I’ve set up a Discord server

:facepalm_picard:

I’ve definitely also had the experience of dodgy hardware support (in Armbian, which is all volunteer) with weird Chinese SBCs.

The EliteDesks are nice, but beware top venting if you’re planning to stack them vertically

haha, all 3 x86 servers I started with are OptiPlex SFF. Commodity business PCs for the win.

I’ve since upgraded two of them to even smaller 1L USFF PCs (one Dell one HP) and the beastliest OptiPlex SFF (i7-4770) is now my database server and NAS box. All of them run Proxmox.

I thought this was about physical hardware, lol.

FWIW I have been upgrading my stack on a very tight budget and there are some incredible deals on used/refurb PCs out there… just wait & watch for a couple weeks if need be, and you can get yourself a secondhand business PC for dirt cheap.