this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
38 points (91.3% liked)

Selfhosted

57577 readers
1058 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I've been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I'm so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?

My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:

  • 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
  • 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
  • 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
  • 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing..? or nextcloud?)
  • potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
  • potential email hosting (distant future)

anyways with that all said i have a few questions:

  • what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
  • any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

QuickSync is more than sufficient for most users. It can handle several concurrent 4K transcode. It's also not that common to have to transcode, unless you stream your media content when away from home a lot, and have poor upload speed.

If going Intel, there's different models of Intel iGPU, so I'd go for the lowest-end GPU that has the higher end iGPU. My home server is a few years old and has an Intel Core i5 13500. The difference between the 13400 and 13500 looks small on paper, but the 13400 only has UHD Graphics 730 while the 13500 had UHD Graphics 770 which can handle double the number of concurrent transcodes.

Intel iGPUs also support SR-IOV which lets you share one iGPU across multiple VMs. For example, if you have a Plex server on the host Linux system, and Blue Iris in a Windows Server VM, and both need to use hardware transcoding.

I've heard AMD's onboard graphics are pretty good these days, but I haven't tried AMD CPUs on a server.

[–] ShortN0te@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've heard AMD's onboard graphics are pretty good these days, but I haven't tried AMD CPUs on a server.

The main issue is afaik still the software support, here are NVIDIA and Intel years ahead.

The benefit of going with a dGPU is that in a few years when for example maybe AV1 takes even more off, you can just switch the GPU and you're done and do not have to swap the whole system. That at least was my thinking on my setup. My CPU, a 3600x is still good for another 10 years probably.

[–] dan@upvote.au 1 points 1 day ago

for example maybe AV1 takes even more off,

I know this was just an example, but Intel 11th gen and newer has hardware acceleration for AV1.

GPUs have their place, but they significantly increase power consumption, which is an issue in areas with high power prices.