Selfhosted

I used to selfhost on a core 2 duo thinkpad R60i. It had a broken fan so I had to hide it into a storage room otherwise it would wake up people from sleep during the night making weird noises. It was pretty damn slow. Even opening proxmox UI in the remotely took time. KrISS feed worked pretty well tho.

I have since upgraded to... well, nothing. The fan is KO now and the laptop won't boot. It's a shame because not having access to radicale is making my life more difficult than it should be. I use CalDAV from disroot.org but it would be nice to share a calendar with my family too.

Maybe a more reasonable question: Is there anyone here self-hosting on non-shit hardware? 😅

I started my self hosting journey on a Dell all-in-one PC with 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and Intel Pentium, running Proxmox, Nextcloud, and I think Home Assistant. I upgraded it eventually, now I'm on a build with Ryzen 3600, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and 4x4 TB HDD

Enterprise level hardware costs a lot, is noisy and needs a dedicated server room, old laptops cost nothing.

My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I'm not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

Plex server is running on my old Threadripper 1950X. Thing has been a champ. Due to rebuild it since I've got newer hardware to cycle into it but been dragging my heels on it. Not looking forward to it.

Somehow Jellyfin works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My first @home server was an old defective iMac G3 but it did the job (and then died for good) A while back, I got a RP3 and then a small thin client with some small AMD CPU. They (barely) got the job done.

I replaced them with an HP EliteDesk G2 micro with a i5-6500T. I don't know what to do with the extra power.

All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.

Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it's a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection

kind of.. a "AMD GX-420GI SOC: quad-core APU" the one with no L3 Cache, in an Thin Client and 8Gb Ram. old Laptop ssd for Storage (128GB) Nextcloud is usable but not fast.

edit: the Best thing: its 100% Fanless

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn't subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn't going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn't justify its continued operation.

Maybe not shit, but exotic at that time, year 2012.
The first Raspberry Pi, model B 512 MB RAM, with an external 40 GB 3.5" HDD connected to USB 2.0.

It was running ARM Arch BTW.

Next, cheap, second hand mini desktop Asus Eee Box.
32 bit Intel Atom like N270, max. 1 GB RAM DDR2 I think.
Real metal under the plastic shell.
Could even run without active cooling (I broke a fan connector).

7 websites, Jellyfin for 6 people, Nextcloud, CRM for work, email server for 3 domains, NAS, and probably some stuff I've forgotten on a $4 computer from a tiny thrift store in BFE Kansas. I'd love to upgrade, but I'm always just filled with joy whenever I think of that little guy just chugging along.

People in this thread have very interesting ideas of what "shit hardware" is