Selfhosted
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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At that price, the hardware will be ancient and you will spend more on electricity in a year than you spent on the server.
Lmao dude thats simply not happening at that price.
You could get part of the way there with an old Dell server, but youβre probably gonna be paying closer to 2-300 for a decently specβd one like youβre describing. Youβre probably gonna be looking at a 10 year old twin quad core setup with a tdp of like 500W combined for JUST the cores. Your power bill is going to murder your budget, even if you somehow find a magical deal on the box.
You can usually find HPs for cheaper although they are pretty picky on what they work with. For some reason, HP decided that it will work with stuff they have not certified but the fans will constantly be at 100%.
Bear in mind, a system that is built to be a dedicated server will be meant to crunch data. That means 2 things:
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loud fans
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heavy electricity use
If you just want a lab, I suggest getting a desktop PC and loading a server OS on it. Practical hardware experience isn't too valuable because platforms change and they usually make them super simple to maintenance with lots of online support. Getting a desktop will also save you some bread on initial investment.
Honestly that sounds overkill for someones. First time into self hosting.
I would start with something like a Nuc or a secondhand 1 liter PC (dell optiplex/HP elite mini/Lenovo ThinkCenter) which are dirt cheap on eBay.
Do you have an indication of what you want to run that requires that mid range gaming setup?
Definitely agree. If you need to spin up a bunch of discrete VMs for labbing, that's one thing, but noise, cooling, power consumption, and space all come into play for dedicated hardware. I host a variety of services and they all run on small, low energy hardware (which is often pretty cheap). I just spun up a matrix server on a $100 ebay HP ProDesk which has plenty of power (probably enough to deploy my whole stack).
Unless you have use case for that much horsepower I would suggest, like others here, buy a mini PC as a start and if you need more down the line buy a second one. They are cheap, fairly quiet and don't use much power.
The only option that fits your budget today I can think of would be picking up one of the old xeon combos off of AliExpress. I spent like $100 on a MB+CPU+64GB DDR4 combo with a 2880 v4 I think. 14c/28t at any rate. You can probably grab a case/power supply/video card used for under $50 on eBay.
Please note that I'm not saying that this is a good option; it took a lot of fiddling for me to get mine running smoothly. But if you've got more time and patience than money, it might work for you.
Damn, what do you need that much RAM for?
Virtualization
If it becomes an AI homelab, that's not so crazy.
I know there are valid use cases for that much, I just always like to check that they didn't just see an LTT video and think they need way more than they do.
I'd recommend to go with some form of mini PC. If you don't need much CPU power there are some very cheap N100 ones where you can upgrade the RAM.
N100 are low power, but quite capable of doing most things you'll be asking a simple service box to do for you. Good option, and cheap.
Are you just starting out? I got started with home labbing with a Raspberry Pi 2B (1GB RAM!) and an external HDD I had lying around. I host Yarr, Navidrome, backups and a dashboard app Ive written on there and I am quite satisfied. I would really recommend starting small with hardware you already have and then buy new hardware as you go along. I am also using Tailscale. With this you can get your initial setup up and running in a day and save money if it turns out home labbing isnt for you or you dont really need the hardware.
Any old Dell desktop/workstation/server should reach those specs. Poweredge rX30 and up, precision XX20/30 and up or optiplex (donβt know or understand that product line). Most of them are being rescued from the landfill. Might have to spend a crap ton over your budget, like 5-10x over, but you will get those specs.
Look at an r430 barebones, no cpu/ram and build from there using spec sheets from Dell on what it takes. I was able to get one for $400 3 years back, even came with 16gb of ram and a single 10 core Xeon e5-v3.
Also, what are you doing that need these kinds of specs? Running more than 10 VMs at once? Cloud gaming? Form follows function.
Honestly, when it comes to your specified amount of Cores & RAM you'll have tough luck. Got myself a MiniPC with 5700U and 32GB of RAM, two 1TB SSDs (mirrored) and 3 NIC but that was still 500β¬ after waiting for a decent deal.
Even buying a used PC off eBay will most likely cost far more if you insist on your specs.
If your budget is $150, then you need to look for used options on eBay. Look for Dell Optiplex or Lenovo ThinkCentre towers. You will not find specs that good in your price range. But maybe you can get a decent CPU and save money to upgrade your RAM later.
MAYBE you'll get lucky and find an old Dell server on eBay. Sometimes IT guys will sell their company's old server for a profit. But I personally wouldn't buy one of those, the monthly electricity costs are stupid.
https://www.newegg.com/intel-nuc10i5fnhn-frost-canyon/p/2SW-000B-005P1
Intel NUC 10 Mini PC,Frost Canyon NUC10i5FNHN,Win10 Pro Intel Core i5-10210U,Up to 4.2GHz Turbo,4 Cores,25W Intel UHD Graphics,WiFi6,Thunderbolt 3(64GB RAM+1TB SSD)
$570 USD
This is basically what I run my home server apps with, all 10 or so in Docker. It's way more $$$ than you're hoping for but it kicks ass.
Good luck,
I guess some perspective on some other comments here. I have a dell r720xd dual xenon's 16 total cores 128gb ram it uses roughly 200watts per hour with the 11000w power supplies. it can get fairly loud when using lots processing power. I bought a 12u rack to mount it nicely in my office. It is also my guest bedroom, while everyone we have had doesn't mind the noise not all guests would appreciate the white noise even with many of the cpu intensive stuff turned off and it as quiet as it goes. Fans full tilt would be obnoxious and hard to concentrate.
Iβm using an old gaming pc. 16 gb ram and i5 9400F. Less specs than what youβre looking for but Iβm running Nextcloud, Plex (@4k), Pihole, home assistant, and an entire Debian virtual machine. All of that uses 10GB of ram.
If ya want budget, you can go really far with low specs.
Yeah, I agree. I've wanted to get into home servers for a while now. The final push was me running a Valheim server for me and my friends on my regular PC, while I also recently got some old parts from a friend that had build a new PC.
I just needed to gather a few more parts that were missing (case, SSD and CPU cooler) and now it's running like a dream. It's some old-ass hardware: An i5 4460 with 8GB of DDR3 and a 250GB SSD. That's a 10 year old CPU. Doesn't seem like a lot and I haven't put a lot of services on it for now, but it still runs surprisingly well. I'm currently running a Valheim server with often 2-4, sometimes 5 or 6 players playing at the same time, Adguard and Syncthing. And yet, only 2.4GB of Ram is in use, with often around/less than 10% CPU usage, maybe a little more when a lot of people start playing VH. The CPU temps are around 30-33 degrees Celsius today, and that's only because summer is arriving. It was consistently around 25 degrees Celsius in the past week. Today I tried to add a Wireguard server to it, although I ran into some problems and I wanted to put some more thought into what OS to run anyway (It's just Ubuntu Server for now as I just wanted to get the Valheim server to run for now).
I'm starting to get into an infodump, but long story short: You can indeed get really, really far with some very cheap hardware. I've only spend around 50-60 euros on it so far, by having some luck, patience and keeping an eye out for deals or viable hardware that people want to get rid of. You can always upgrade to something more powerful or more energy efficient, but if you just want to get into the hobby, you really don't need a lot.
Youβre not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.
For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.
You need at least $1,000,000
And a helicopter.
I'm assuming you've never built a computer before because even 32 GB of RAM costs more than $150 π€£
32 GB of DDR4 RAM is about 70 USD here. But you don't need 32, you can selfhost plenty of stuff on 16 or even 8 GB. Heck I ran mine on an old 4 GB stick for a couple of years when I first started.
Bro think about used part and I don't need 7200mhz ddr5
What are you actually gonna be doing? Not 10 virtual machines or whatever you said, what actual services are you gonna be running?
Sorry I says vm but in fact this is containers
In Proxmox :
VM with Truenas Scale VM with Debian to run docker :
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wireguard
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reverse proxy
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jellyfin (+ jellyseerr)
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radarr, sonnarr, prowlarr
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nextcloud
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pfsense
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duckdns
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zabbix (and maybe grafena)
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NUT
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Pie-Hole like
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2 websites
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| LTT | Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
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