Selfhosted

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.

Alright, not sure how many will circle back, but I've narrowed down my choices, as they hit my current thresholds - N150 or equivalent/greater, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe, and Dual LAN connection.

1st place - Morefine M9S - This caught my eye, as although because to me it's a no-name brand, it has a beefiest specs still well within my price range ($270-ish)

2nd place - Pulcro.io TurnKey Two - These guys I just found, and they seem the most... professional? Same specs as the two below.

3rd place - BeeLink EQ14 - Weird that link has it as an N100, clearly shows N150 on the page...

Thoughts?

I just run it all on a retired laptop. Low power, quiet, plenty of performance. With a NAS next to it, even storage is no issue.

Get a N100/N150 system with 12GB+ RAM for ~150 €/$. Alternatively check for one with replaceable RAM.

To get experience with Linux you can install VirtualBox on Windows and set up some Linux virtual machines. It's easier than most people think.

Used to run on a pi 4 but moved to a 11th Gen NUC and wouldn't go back. Well, the pi was nice when I didn't have any money but the performance boost of just an i3 is hard to beat. With headless debian 13, the nuc now draws 5w idle. Seriously low consumption, costs like 10eur in electric energy per year. Pi 4 still found a home for homeassistant +zigbee stack.

Best bang for your buck in general, IMO, is going to be an off-lease mini or SFF from eBay.

I think the N100 units are still the best value.

I've found that you don't need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won't be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they're idle, so it won't use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.

tldr: A used x86 desktop is better than a pi

I've never understood why so many people self-host on pis. If it's at home and not on a sailboat or drone, don't worry about the power consumption. Worry about having enough power for a smooth operation.

Like imagine your jellyfin skips during videos. Now you have to chase down the bottleneck and when you do, probably can't upgrade the hardware anyway.

Plus if the project doesnt have an ARM binary or container, you have to create a compilation workflow.

Hospitals and schools upgrade their hardware every five years or so (when windows starts to slow down). The x86 workstations go up for auction for cheap. I buy them direct at govdeals.com (usa) where they usually sell in lots. If you just need one, look on ebay where the units are typically resold. Either way you can find something decent for $50-$100.

So buy an x86. It will live forever and you can use your pi in a weather station or drone or similar project where size and power consumption matter.

In my own setup, I have jellyfin on one $50 workstation and homeassistant/frigate on another. I would not have space (resources) for both on one machine because frigate is doing object detection on six cameras (even with a hardware detector). So the homeassistant computer has that NPU and zigbee dongle and a big hard drive for the recordings. In the Jellyfin machine, I put a 12tb hdd for the media and graphics card that is really good at transcoding (I travel a lot and stream videos from home).

Dell refurbished 1L PC?

Buy a 7th gen Intel based tiny/mini/micro PC instead of a Pi or NUC. You get much more bang for your buck. 35W max draw. They are far more capable than people give them credit for. I run 3 of them (4 if you count the Mac mini).

I’ve had good experience with the Minisforum MS-01, while it’s more than your $200 mentioned, it’s been worth every penny. Plenty of power for most homelabs and lots of nice features for future proofing (10gb, Ethernet, plenty of storage options, small but still usable pcie expansion slot) in a small form factor.

I’ve pretty much retired all my RPis at this point and my old Synology NAS is now just storage only with the MS-01 doing all the actual work.

Really don’t have a reason to migrate away from it for many years unless it died. Even then, you can create a promox cluster with them trivially to provide some redundancy.

They also have the a1 and a2 options for AMD but the a1 doesn’t have the same feature set and a2 is pretty expensive if you don’t need the extra power.

Maybe you enjoy the "getting it to work" part more than me. I went from RPi to a cheap used miniPC from eBay. Installed Debian and bought a wireless keyboard with touchpad. Cheap and so much simpler. Plays all my flac music through Strawberry, plays all my movies at home and away. Easiest VPN setup, I don't use smart functions of my TV, just the miniPC for everything.

Pi 4 should be plenty to run Jellyfin, homeassistant, pihole and octoprint. Docker setup is pretty straightforward, and I can vouch that HA & pihole containers work great on RPi, if you want to leave the Jellyfin setup as-is and put the others alongside.

If you're looking for an excuse to expand, my vote is for an N100 type system. I got one with 4 ethernet ports, PCIe for a wifi card, couple of NVME slots, and a half dozen SATA ports for $100-150. That's a huge step up in potential without much increase in power draw. With the right wifi card, you can even use it to replace your WAP/router.

While I get leaning towards AMD products, I've been doing so as well, when I built my first server with a Ryzen 5 2400GE I have found that there just isn't as much resources/support for enabling transcoding with the vega 11 in Jellyfin or Immich. Most Intel iGPU's have a hardware chip specifically tuned for transcoding called quicksync that you should strongly consider.

Especially in the $100-200 price range tiny mini micro's from HP/Lenovo/Dell are widely available and offer lots of capability in a power-efficient (~10-15w idle, 40-50w full load) and easily maintainable form factor. The Lenovo's in particular are interesting due to a few models having full pci-e slots if you decide later you want a GPU.
Lenovo pci-e

Finally for software I would suggest looking into Cosmos Cloud, I use it and have found it made it so much easier to setup and manage all my docker containers and domain name/reverse proxy settings.

I'm in a similar situation currently hosting Pihole on my Pi's and Jellyfin on a SFF refurbished PC that's running some other project. I've decided to go with a NUC, most likely beelink, and intend to install Proxmox to then run container VMs for each of the various projects to more easily manage them.

I'm using a 2019 Dell SFF OptiPlex.

With the current 8TB data drive, it idles at 18w, but being Intel can convert or transcode very quickly.

With the previous 2TB drive it idled at 12w, little more than a Pi but far more capable.

I run my PiHole on it plus Jellyfin, HandBrake, etc. It also has 4 VMs using VMware for some other stuff as needed (testing mostly).

Hard to beat the bang for buck, or per watt.

I have a NUC with an intel N6005 in it for around that price, very happy with it.

I use RPi 4 2Gb for Pi-Hole.

Just retired a broken 8th gen intel i3 laptop used for Jellyfin. Its replacement is a GMKTec G3 N100. 4 core 4 thread, single channel SDRAM, but 12th gen Intel which is capable of a wider range of encoding & transcoding. Came with 8Gb ram and 256GB Nvme. Cost Less than £100 on ebay. Jellyfin installed ontop of Debian & very pleased with it.

Currently running Truenas scale with smb shares to service local network.

Additionally VPN on router provides access to home network.

I have a few redundant Rpi's sitting about now as I've consolidated and will be using more NUC/ MiniPC hardware in future. They're just better value at the moment for me.

Not looked at HA seriously yet, but its part of the plan

HAOS has add-ons to run a sort of managed version I think of pihole. Good start for containers.

RAID0 is not RAID, because R stands for redundant and RAID0 has dependency on as many drives are in the machine. You need to change that. One drive fails you lose everything.

The question is pertinent to my interests and the answer is to spend some time learning about the benefits and disadvantages of chipsets and processors unfortunately.