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!
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Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
Even has a KVM for emergency access ;)
absolutely this.
Dammit, I have a few of those, you’re killing my excuse to buy a new toy!
Let me help you with that: what if you need more power? or what if you need something smaller due to size constraints or maybe what if the old battery can’t handle 24/7?. Pick one!
@pathief I think what you are looking for is intel n100 since it only uses like 6-watt TDP, but before jumping to that, you should look at Heaven video. If you only want to run for a year or two, maybe the older CPU is much better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PisIPpbMkTc
I hope you found what you are looking for.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=PisIPpbMkTc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This. I did extensive research and will get myself a n100 or n200 for my on-prem server. Itcaps out at 16 GB ram, but I’ll survive. N305 has 3x the power consumption as n200 at around 15W. Asrock even has a mITX mobo for the n100. And its fanless!
RPI5 would be the other obvious choice, but it’s impossible to get a hold of.
Edit: Also, check out this thread: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/2340730
A refurbished elite desk sff PC works great.
Just got one for $100 on r/hardwareswap (yes I still visit reddit, but I can’t give up hardwareswap) a couple weeks ago
You can get them on eBay and Amazon for that much.
I have an Intel NUC I got on eBay for £50. It’s running 30 containers, 10W draw
Any Intel NUC(the small 4x4 ones) 8th gen or forward will fit the bill.
Hey fellow european!
Tinytronics.nl -> Pi4 model B 8GB: 87€ and in stock. The 4GB model is 68€. They also have orange Pi for a higher budget.
Kiwi-electronics.com -> Pi 4 model B, 4GB? 63€. They also have all the pi accessories you could want.
If you are going to use paperless for important documents, and if you want to not lose data for sure, get a 1TB cheap HDD or something and a USB3.0 adapter. SD cards will eventually fail.
Otherwise, get an old used laptop 2nd hand. I used an old HP probook G1 laptop for about a year for my server. It didn’t use much power at all.
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini (or equivalent)? You can get them for pretty cheap on eBay.
Lenovo m900 tiny. Low cost and power.
They’re also surprisingly easy to upgrade for their size. Swapped RAM, CPU, and hard drive in about 15 minutes total on one of mine.
Think centre tiny gang rise up :-) !
I second Lenovo tiny. I have 3 x m920q with a gigabit switch and total combined power draw is about 53w
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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 :/
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
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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!
Very nice! I am running an HC4 (I think; the toaster) now since last month and so far, it’s running much better than I thought! So yes, check that one first, then see if you have to upgrade and if you do, go for aarch64 or traditional x64 but not 32 bit arm
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In my country pi4 8GB ram with PSU 130€ and then you need SD card and/or SSD
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
Ooo learn something new every day. I’m going to have to try this out later. Thanks!
A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.
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.
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.
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could you please elaborate? what is SFF hardware?
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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.
We buy the HP Pro/Elitedesk 1L pcs as backup servers and attach storage.
Works pretty good and they are pretty cheap with the power they can provide.
+1 for CasaOS! The simplest and best I’ve tried.
Lots of good suggestions here already but nobodys mentioned the Asrock A300 DeskMini. Low power consumption and you could probably find one for pretty cheap.
Obviously an old laptop you don’t use anymore is a great and affordable choice too. Comes with a built-in battery backup!
