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?
Let’s put it this way, I’m hosting about 30 Docker containers including a full Servarr stack, Jellyfin, and Mastodon on an old Dell workstation intended for office work.
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
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.
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.
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!
Anything you need to buy is more expensive than anything you already have.
Especially if youre worried about power costs.
Reuse wha you have, replace when you need to.
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
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
There are advantages to getting server-grade hardware. It’s designed to run 24/7, often supports more hard drives, ram sticks, processors, etc, and often is designed to make it very quick to replace things when they break.
You can find used servers on sites like EBay for reasonable prices. They typically come from businesses selling their old hardware after an upgrade.
However, for simple home use cases, an old regular desktop PC will be just fine. Run it until it breaks!
While yes, there is a reason why I have retired the Dell server I had for a normal desktop PC. The server was so loud, I could hear it two stairs and two closed doors away.
I was able to quiet mine with a bash script until eventually a software update changed the fan control to keep it quiet for me.
Those Dell fans were never built to be quiet. And they are also not built to be replaced by any quiet fans.
