Good hardware options for home servers?
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I know people have mentioned some good options on here before but I'm struggling to find the relevant threads.
What do people recommend for a server at home?
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It depends on how capable a server it needs to be, but you know that already.
Given that many people run cloudron and other stuff on quite low-spec VPS, I would not over-spec your home server unless you know it needs to be so.
I use a low-cost mini-PC sourced off Amazon (yeah, I know), about £300, reformatted it for Ubuntu. -
Small form factor PCs are dirt cheap on eBay (sub $100) like the HP elitedesk 800 G3 mini, i5-6500T and up to 32gb RAM. I figured my electric consumption is around $4 usd per mo.
At home, I have Nextcloud, vaultwarden, and a bunch of other personal apps and barely use any of its resources, so it’s an overkill for a few users.
At work, I have much more apps for all my internal business needs, along with some public facing ones like invoice ninja and they’ve both been running reliably 24/7.
I have a bunch of these HP pcs scattered around the home and office as secondary and backup devices. I even use one for streaming on my TV. Btw, unlike other SFF pcs from other brands from the same generation, the HP ones are compatible with NVME drives!
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An Intel N100 equipped device is (still) fully capable and very low on power consumption (the N300 doesn’t seem much of an upgrade). I‘d get something fanless. See reviews e.g. on https://www.fanlesstech.com/
BTW I‘m currently moving some critical services away from my self hosted home server setup. Passwords are too important, they should be hosted and protected by professionals, in my opinion, I therefore moved them to Bitwarden hosting (for just 1$ / month, it‘s a no brainer).
Same goes for important documents that I have moved from Nextcloud (whose product strategy I don’t understand) to (the E2E encrypted) iCloud (since I already have it for their fantastic photo and backup service, anyway).
Having worked in an IT company for the last 2 years (as a lawyer who works on escalations with customers, inter alia) has made me more appreciative of professional IT security (and more wary of my own skills in this area)…
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I run an Intel NUC with an i3 and 16Gb of memory which serves me well for all my personal needs, so far never exhausted that and very happy with it for many years now actually. Also for home automation I have a ZimaBoard, which I luckily got from @luckow, in another location. It has no AVX so no mongodb, but otherwise it is awesome. Fully passive, low power and rock solid
Both run on a residential connection with dynamic IP. I was a bit uneasy with those initially but over the years it showed that uptime is quite incredible. Backups are all done to a Hetzner Storagebox via SSHFs.
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I am pretty happy with the MS-01 „workstation“ from MinisForum. It has options for more than one NVME so you can run a software RAID and has solid hardware specs. Pricing is much higher than used mini PC systems off eBay, but if you are looking for powerful, silent, and small hardware this might be an option to consider (if it fits the budget).
https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01 -
I am running a Intel J4125 with 16GB RAM and an Intel J5040 with 16GB RAM. Both are par in terms of performance. Power Consumption is very low with <10 Watts
