EDIT 2: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.
EDIT: Holy shit, was not expecting so much support for my inquiry. Thank you all for the bevy of ideas and solutions. I think I'm still gonna go for the Intel 12th Gen+ NUC style, although some of your setups seriously made me quite jelly. Maybe I'll get there one of these days. I'll update this when I finally lock down my purchase :)
Hey all, lurker for a bit, but just joined because I've started my journey of self hosting the simple stuff (or at least I hope it's simple). For the past couple years I've been using a RPi Zero W for PiHole, and more recently go into Jellyfin and Home Assistant, using an RPi4 and an RPi3+ respectively. I've also got a hand-me-down Synology ds214j NAS with 2x8TB in ~~RAID0~~ RAID1, which is about half full atm. I'm not expecting to expand that storage anytime soon, so I've pivoted to an attempt at combining the 3 Pis above into one NUC/SFF/etc device with a roughly similar power draw. Also looking at re-jumping back into 3D printing using OctoPrint.
I've looked briefly at jumping to a Pi5, but that led me down the rabbit hole with Jeff Geerling's article/video on Pi vs. NUC. I've continued to putter around looking at NUCs in the ~$200 range. Hoping to stick with MinisForum, GMKTek, or Beelink if possible, but only because... it's all I know. I'd like to also tinker deeper with Linux flavors, as I'm a noob at best with it but want to at least have some growing knowledge, as I've primarily been a Windows gamer and use Apple at the office almost exclusively. I'd like to try staying with AMD as I've slowly moved over from the "dark side" (don't hurt me) that is Intel and Nvidia.
Last nugget is that I've never tinkered with Docker, as it seems that may be the best route to host all these apps on one contiguous installation. I've new-ish to VMs too, so anything "Baby's First VM" would be nice.
I know I made a giant pile of wants/needs, so if there's no magical unicorn, I'm cool with other ideas. Thanks in advance, and I'm really keen on seeing what options I have.
EDIT: I’ve chosen the Beelink EQ14. It had the best “last-gen” specs, lowest price, and better hardware (BT 5.2 vs Pulcro’s 4.2, as well as Wifi6 vs Wifi5). I also ruled out the Morefine because all of its reviews were paid, not very reassuring imho.
Wow, yeah this looks great. 16GB/512GB for under $200 makes this a frontrunner for now. Outside of Jellyfin, what else do you run, and how do you have it containerized? I'm inching closer to Proxmox vs Docker due to issues brought up in other comments.
Also running Calibre, Syncthing, Transmission and Filen. all on Linux Mint.
I can't cope with TUI-only OS's - the command stuff makes no sense to me at all. I've learned some of it, and am trying to get Nextcloud running in Docker behind Nginx Proxy Manager, but I can't work out DDNS yet so.... 😂
I was keen on Proxmox or Yunohost, but put off by the fact that they totally replace the OS. I'd be more comfortable with something that runs on the OS, like Docker does.
I know some of those words, but with that said, thank you for those ideas! That's a lot more complicated than I was planning, but you gave me fodder for buying a beefier NUC! I think I'm close to settling with an n97 unit that has dual LAN for Pihole and such.
Would you know of any guides or such to set something as complex as what you've going, or was it more just time and tinkering? I'm still wrestling with which VM setup to use, but at least Mint was on my shortlist for OS choice.
My non-profit the Rebel Tech Alliance is working on a series of blog posts that will look at self hosting for begginners. If you sign up for the blog you'll get them when they're published:
https://blog.rebeltechalliance.org/
Or our main website is at https://www.rebeltechalliance.org/
But really what I've got going (if you exclude Transmission) is the simplest stuff. Jellyfin, Calibre and Syncthing are just 'click and install' - they are all self contained so they don't need all that Docker stuff. I suggest just tinkering with them.
Thanks! I just ordered the BeeLink EQ14 and it'll be here sometime next week. Hopefully your guides prove useful to the noob I am :)