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?
Yea definitely. I started tinkering with my first server in 2020 and used an ewaste dell tower with an i7 3770 (8 years old at that point) and an old rx460 I had laying around. As others mentioned power consumption was way worse than modern hardware. But I had at one point a half dozen people streaming jellyfin 1080 content from it with no hiccups at all. That said I was running on linux, not sure how it would do if you run windows.
Right now I’m using a low power pc to run my server, again an old ewaste dell micro pc with a 5th or 6th gen i5 and no dedicated gpu. Still no problem streaming to my partners and I’s phone/tablet simultaneously. Again, running linux.
I have two servers/mini lab / whatever you want to call em. Ones running unraid and is my main server Frankensteined from an old mini itx mobo off of ebay with an Intel quicksync capable cpu. And the others a $80 Lenovo m93p that I just installed Ubuntu server + casa os to mess around with it.
I love the vibe in this thread/community. You all seem like real cool cats. I appreciate that.
Absolutely, this is great. Knowledgeable people being reasonable.
Old PC’s and especially laptops (make sure to consider removing the battery though) make great homeservers. You can run dozens of services on old hardware.
Leave the battery in and you have a free UPS. Perhaps set it capped at 80% charge to increase its lifespan.
I think that’s preferable. I have resused my old gaming computer as a server since I stopped gaming for a while.
I started with handmedowns donated to my by someone from mastodon that was getting rid of junk computers. All tiny think stations.
There’s no right way, really. You can turn almost anything into a server.
If you have old hardware laying around I suggest you start with that. When you’re comfortable with setting everything up and using it on your day to day, then it’s time to invest into hardware.
When I started my home server was an old laptop, eventually it became an old desktop, and now it’s server specific hardware. My recommendation is use whatever you have at hand unless you have specific reasons. I went from laptop to desktop because I needed more disk space, and went to specialized hardware for practical reasons (less space, less electricity, easily accessible hot swappable hard drives). But for most of the stuff I have there an old laptop would still be enough, heck, a raspberry pi would be enough for most of it.
It depends, but probably. I use 5-10yo laptops running Debian.
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My home server is made of literal garbage.
There are a lot of ways to go. My own isn’t particularly efficient, but it’s an old rack mount server. Everything is built like a tank. It’s robust as hell, and yet everything was well used and cheap. Probably not a good solution if you live somewhere with expensive power, but I don’t.
Servers are just computers, you build what you are going to use it for. You can use a cheap N100 mini pc to host jellyfin as the important part there is the video encoder/decoder to transcode video. Though it can only do 2 streams at 4k with tone mapping. So it might not be good enough if you have more than 2 people using it or are running more stuff on it.
I bought a used m920q for this reason, still working on it, I’m at the docker-compose phase
Those are beasts! My homelab has three of them in a Proxmox cluster. I love that for not a ton of extra money you can throw in a PCIe expansion slot and the power consumption for all three is less than my second hand Dell Tower server.
Do you have any good resources I can look at to see if a cluster is something I should look into?
Not really, but I can give you my reasons for doing so. Know that you’ll need some shared storage (NFS, CIFS, etc) to take full advantage of the cluster.
- Zero downtime for patching. Taking systems offline to update Proxmox sucks, especially if the upgrade fails for some reason. A cluster means I can evacuate one host, upgrade it, and move on to the next with no downtime for the hosted VMs.
- Critical service resiliency. I have a couple of critical systems in my home lab that, if they unexpectedly go down, will make for a very bad day. For instance, my entire home network (and lab) is configured to use a PowerDNS cluster for DNS. I can put the master PowerDNS server on one host and the slave on a second host - if I have a hardware failure, I won’t lose DNS. I have a similar setup for my Kubernetes cluster’s worker nodes.
- Experimentation. A cluster gives me a larger shared pool of CPU/Memory than my single host could offer. This means I can spin up new VMs, LXC containers, etc and just play with new software and services. Heck that’s how I got started with my Kubernetes cluster - I had some spare capacity so I found a blog post that talked about Kubes on LXC containers and I spun it up.
I hope that helps give some reasons for doing a cluster, and apologies for not replying immediately. I’m happy to share more about my homelab/answer other questions about my setup.
That makes sense, thanks for sending that. My needs are far less critical or have a need to redundancy like that but just knowing that is an option is awesome
My home media server is an old nuc mini pc i5 16Gb RAM with attached usb storage running on a Linux distro, runs Jellyfin and a few other applications for the household.
In short yes, an old pc will work fine.
These also have the advantage of being nice and quiet, which if you are going to have it in your house rather than a hot garage or whatever can be nice.
I bought a NAS, later realised that it supported Plex and Jellyfin but it was often too slow to do the transcoding. I still use it for storage but there were no real upgrade options. It was cheaper to get an old NUC, rather than replace the NAS with a high spec one to be able to run Jellyfin properly.I’m doing a very similar thing with an old Dell thin client. I did inherit a large server from a company that was upgrading, but I’ve been thinking about downsizing a lot lately so now I use a few small computers on a 10 inch rack.
the best server is one that you already have
