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.
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I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that's off the table. I'll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that "does it all" remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
any old laptop with at least a third gen intel or something comparable works. you do want to get some extra storage via a cheap old hdd
I live in Brazil too and bought a R$120 old HP computer running Windows XP on MercadoLivre. Works decently enough for a Minecraft server after an upgrade (4 to 8GB of RAM). Old computers are great for price and they're good if you can upgrade them.
For general purposes, get something better than what I bought since it is not the fastest (even though it runs the Minecraft server software alright, it still lags). Maybe upgrading with an SSD would help performance.
I have a old optiplex 7010 with i7 and 8gig RAM. About 70€ on eBay. I upgraded it with a nvme SSD to bolt from (great tutorial here) and salvaged an old SATA HDD from an external case.
Currently runs 11+ container in proxmox without issues. Way beefier than a raspberry pi.
I also have room for 3 more hdds to put in a mergerfs system and 2 additional pcie slots für things like a faster LAN card or an additional SATA controller
This depends entirely on what you want to run. A pihole needs vastly different resources than for example offering jellyfin to 20 simultaneous users. Both can be hosted at home.
The one you already have and/or if a raspberry pi 2 (all) can do it…. So can you. It’s not a game, you don’t need a RTX 9090Ti Super Omega Beta Pizza to run it.
The things I paid attention to was
USB3 - you need this otherwise connecting external drives will be a joke
Motherboard needs to accept up to 32 GB of RAM. Mine currently has only 8 but knowing I can upgrade is nice.
Quiet - must be silent when idle.
CPUs of less than 8th? gen will suck at video transcoding due to lacking certain capabilities. Important if running jellyfin, etc.
The beauty of self hosting is it's all about your individual circumstances so you priorities and acceptable tradeoffs will differ.
i’d modify the CPU requirement and say you can sub that out for a 2nd hand cheap nvidia card if it’s easier
here’s the table of cards with nvenc: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new
i’m running an old af xeon and added a $30 entry level GPU from years ago and it was a great upgrade
I have very similar requirements, but I'm currently using a Pi with some external drives since that's how I started out. Would you mind sharing what you ended up buying? My place is pretty small, so the 'quiet' requirement is one I care about a lot. Personally I'd love to get something passively cooled, but I haven't seen much!
My preferences are quite different.
You'll need a lot of RAM for all the containers, 64 GB is nice. A CPU that saves power when idle is fine. You'll need at least 16 TB storage (32 TB RAID1). SATA HDD is fine, when you have ZFS and cache using SSDs. Never use USB for drives.
It does not need to be quiet. Just put it in the basement and close the door.
My jelly fin server is running off of an entry level desktop in 2009, a single core celeron processor. I have to downscale video files to standard definition in order for it to keep up.
If you aren't planning on running a media server go for a old desktop or laptop (with Ethernet port). Your bottleneck will be your network speed 9 time out of 10. Also use a firewall and a anti scrapper (ex: Anubis) to avoid wasting resources.
I'm using my old desktop from 2010. There's no such thing as a server that can "do it all", but any computer from the last 10 years would probably be a fine place to start. The more you do, the more likely you'll be to hit some sort of performance limit, and by that time you'll know more about what you actually want.
In short, find old cheap/free hardware and start playing around.
raspberry pi's arent the best option anyway since you need to add on a hat just to get some SATA ports. i think Odroid has some boards with sata connectors. zimaboard or zimablade are some other options off the top of my head
But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.
"All" can include anything. I mean, you can include a home parallel compute render farm that will cost millions of dollars.
You're going to have to narrow it a bit down. You can have people maybe suggest some of the things that they use their systems for. Maybe it's hosting services for a cell phone that some people use cloud-based services for. Maybe it's home automation. Maybe it's a webserver. Maybe it's AI image generation.
EDIT: To put it another way, a self-hosted server is just a computer, often without a monitor and keyboard directly attached, that you have in your physical possession. The range of things that that might be used for and capabilities it might have is really broad. It's like saying "I want a vehicle. What is a vehicle that can do everything?" I mean, that might be a bicycle or a three-trailer road train, depending upon what you're going for.
You can build a render farm for not all that much money. You will pay a very high electric bill but other than that it is possible.
I mean, you can build a render farm on a single Raspberry Pi if you want, technically.
8 GB RAM or more. OS installed either to SSD, or a HDD that does not store service data (for performance). a modern CPU with at least 4 cores. modern means it has at least AES and AVX2 instruction sets to do math quickly, but probably you can just pick one made in the last 10 years, with less years generally meaning better energy efficiency.
what kind of services do you want to host on it? initial plans, perhaps longer term plans?
Rather than give you specific recommendations, here's some guidance for parts
Mobo: The more slots you have for RAM and storage, the better.
CPU: literally anything. More cores and faster cores are ideal, but CPU requirements for these things are generally lower than a desktop.
RAM: Buy 1 stick of the fastest and highest capacity RAM your motherboard can handle. When you're ready or you start to see slowdown, buy another of the same stick. You can get far on 16-32GB, you won't need much more until later.
Storage: an SSD for the OS and one or more HDDs for storage.
PSU: generally anything in the 500-700 range will be good. You'll want more if you plan to put a GPU in, though.
A repurposed old PC with something like yunohost, generic Debian, or some lightweight Linux will probably get you what you need.
It heavily depends on what programs you want to run.
Do you have access to Raspberry Pi clones like Orange Pis etc? They’re often cheaper and you can order them straight from China.
That very much depends on what you want it to do (what is "everything") and how many users you have.
Why would raspberry pi's be expensive but the hardware to build a server be any cheaper?
Second hand markets exist and Raspberry Pis are rarely sold second hand.
Sorry for my ignorance, so brasil has nothing like an Amazon where OP could buy a new pi from and have it delivered? If thats the case i feel like I could buy OP a pi and ship it to them in brasil for less cost than it would be to buy anyother option of hardware for a home server. Assuming USPS still offers flat rate boxes for international shipments.
I'm not Brazilian, but I'm guessing importing stuff is expensive. Look at PC components elsewhere in the world, it's typically much more expensive than the US.
Right but thats kinda what im saying is that wouldn't all hardware be expensive and not just Pis?
Except second hand. That's my point.
Scalpers for highly sought-after hardware or just general lack of supply in specific regions.
Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won't be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn't powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don't try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.
A CPU that can run Linux along with some networking
A raspberry pi 4 or 5 and some fast USB 3 hard drives.