Selfhosted

39252 readers

254 users here now

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.

Rules:

Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Old PC as Server (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have an early 2000s PC (pre-SATA) with 512MB RAM (I'd love to tell you about the CPU, but its under a cooler that isn't going anywhere) that's been sitting in closets for about 15 years. Assuming I'm willing to buy into it, can something like that reasonably host the following simultaneously on a 40GB boot drive:

Nextcloud Actual Photoprism KitchenOwl SearXNG Katvia Paperless-ngx

Or should I just get new hardware? Regardless, I'd like to do something with this trusty ol business server.

Edit: Lenovo or Dell as the most cost-effective, reliable self-host server in your opinion?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want something small and cheap, it might be worth getting a used thin client PC.

I got a cheap £20 Igel thin client from eBay as raspberry pi’s were still far too expensive, plus I already had a spare 4GB ddr3 sodimm to drop into it and a 120gb wd green ssd that I’d stripped from its case and fitted internally into the thin client.

After upgrading it one ended up with a 1.2ghz AMD GX-412 cpu, 4gb DDR3, 120gb sata ssd and an external usb 3 1tb hard drive i also had laying around.

As a component of my homelab, it’s running Debian 12, docker with a few containers (pigallery 2, Libreddit, portainer, searXNG), it’s my backup Emby server and my main Pihole and PiVPN client.

Completely silent, sips power and still has capacity spare to run more containers and other projects that catch my interest.

https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/Igel/ud/ud3/M340C/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's a pretty cool solution, honestly. I'm considering all options here! I'd hate to invest then find out there are more cost-effective options or that I somehow limited the server's potential.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's what I'm using, it barely uses more power than a pi & it's a 64bit x86 4core with 16GB Dual Channel, 256GB SSD.

I've seen newer versions of what I have for cheaper than the average Pi4, I would never consider the Raspberry over this solution given how monolithically more powerful it is for how small they are.

I have Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Server without a desktop GUI and I control it on my PC via CMD with SSH user@localipaddress

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Working really great for me. I originally just bought it to run Pihole on a dedicated machine and have a secondary pihole instance on my Unraid server in case either of them went down but leaving it sitting there with just PiVPN and Pihole duties seemed wasteful.

I'm getting even more out of it running some of the lighter containers on it with plenty of spare room to do more.

I've logged/uploaded my upgrade process here just so you can get some ideas on what I did.
https://imgur.com/a/ExcLdtt

It is bulkier than a raspberry pi, being around the size of a router but the low cost and being able to utilise hardware that I had sitting doing nothing made me go this route rather than just getting a pi.