I want to get into self hosting, i am planning to tget a topton mini pc as a firewall, but i dont know what to get for the actual server hardware. I am thinking of getting a mini pc here aswell because of low power consumption and not so much noise. These are the services i plan to run on mostly docker in proxmox:
- Home assistant
- Wazuh
- Some dashboard service
- Tor node
- Jellyfin maybe
- Nextcloud
- Photoprism
- Nginx proxy manager
And maybe some other stuff later aswell. But i am also considering running my storage on a seperate NAS machine. So what hardware would you recommend for something like this? Budget if its possible is maximum 400$ not including the firewall.
Add another mini PC off of ebay and you are golden. I’m running most of this on a Synology NAS with a much weaker CPU. It is not quick but OK. Unless you want to add much more than this it will be just fine.
Raspberry Pi for Home Assistant. And a second hand engineering workstation off eBay for everything else. Take a look at the Lenovo P700.
Used Dell Optiplex SFF (Small Form Factor) PC from ebay. They are tiny and total powerhouses for home server stuff. I run one with a 1 TB SSD and 16 TB hard disk, and it runs basically all of that using docker containers. And minus the storage it cost me about $120 bucks.
Various options:
- Raspberry Pi. However, although it can handle a lot of selfhosted stuff, some things won’t be fast. Especially wazuh or nextcloud may be problematic. Also you are limited by ARM architecture and the price is not that beneficial anymore
- Some small form factor (SFF) servers from eBay. Something like Lenovo ThinkCell Tiny or Dell Optiplex Micro. As you will have a second NAS for storage, it will be fine that you can only put 1 HDD/SSD into those models
- A NUC from Minisforum. More pricey but new and plenty of power. Runs with 10W idle. I rock the HM90 EliteMini with 2 SSDs and one onboard NVME for proxmox as hypervisor OS.
Ensure to choose wisely. Especially regarding power consumption and hardware encoding capabilities (Looping at you jellyfin).
Otherwise, some summarized infos here:
https://blog.lrvt.de/homelab-server-recommendation/
BTW: I do not recommend running a Tor exit node.