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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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Should I use dedicated hardware? (feddit.it)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

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Hi everyone, Last month I finally managed to build my first SFF PC (Ryzen 7600 + AMD 6800). I'm also starting to learn about self-hosting and tinkering with it (the usual stuff: Jellyfin, pi-hole, nextcloud, VPN, torrenting etc.)

Thing is, of course, a server has to be always on, and I'm having trouble understanding if it can be reasonable to keep it always on or if it's too pricey and I should invest in a dedicated hardware.

My consideration: a Raspberry Pi seems like it's not enough powerfull after all. I've seen you can come up with an old i5 (4th to 6th gen) minipc with like 100/150 euros, but in not really sure it's gonna consume much less than my system. What do you suggest? What am I missing?

Thank you :)

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[–] rambos 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Nothing will beat single board computer like rpi in power consuption, but PC can be efficient as well. For example in my country I pay around 1€ for each Watt a year (average 0.12€/kwh). So rpi is probably 5€ a year and my new server is like 20-30. There are some servers that run at 10W on idle.

Its 5x difference, but I got much better server and still acceptable cost. Having sata potrs will already save you a lot of $ and time since you need additional hardware to use ssd/hdd on rpi, especially if you need more than 1. And then rpi is not that small anymore. Rpi cant transcode at all, but its good enough for direct play. If you get intel cpu with quicksync you should be golden. I didnt test on 4k, but my g3930 can handle 4x 1080p easy.

I used rpi4 with 4gb ram as media/torrent server for few years and it was simple set and foeget setup untill SSD upgrade when it started started acting up. Figured the rpi cant provide enough juice on USB ports and then I got external power HDD case and got more into self hosting. 4GB soon became a bottleneck so I ended up with new PC and I love it. Still using rpi for 2nd pihole and few more services.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think an old minipc with a intel cpu with quicksync could be fine enough. I may be able to get for free an old notebook with an i3 8gb of ram. Maybe I can reuse that and save some money.

[–] rambos 3 points 11 months ago

Its best if you can get one for free. Integrated UPS is also nice :) even old is probably overkill, im running all services you mentioned +20 more and cpu is chilling most of the time. Good luck