Selfhosted

Why not build a new PC or buy an old pc? One with ryzen 5 5600G, 8gb Ram, 250GB ssd should cost ~250USD whether you buy new/old, i recently checked the prices, cause I needed one and they were similar. This should take you a long way. As for storage just pick a case with enough ssd/harddisk slots.

You can also go much cheaper depending on what you get.

The advantage is you can add a GPU like the intel A380 for av1 encoding of video if you feel like you need it.

For OS depending on what you are doing there are a few choices:

• True nas: mid difficulty
• debian: i just use this with docker, does the job
• alma linux/Rocky linux
• ubuntu
• yunohost: if you would be interested in hosting activitypub apps, easy
• casaos: easy

I’m in the same boat. My poor HC-2 is struggling on memory running Omada (WAP controller) and HomeBridge, among other things. I use Emby so I don’t need transcoding - supports 4k streaming just fine.

Right now I’m looking at one of the fanless Intel four port software routers, like this one.. But for a machine like that I’m going to use ProxMox to spin up a Firewall/Router/VPN/Networking VM - not sure which OS/image. That will remain separate from my media and web serving. I will probably end up just off-loading the network tasks to the new machine, and leave my HC-2 running as a media server. That way I can restart and upgrade the systems independently. Using ProxMox, it may be possible to move the media services onto a second VM on the same machine, but I’m not sure what advantage that might give me, if any.

If you have Plex pass the key for 4k streaming is hardware transcoding. Quick sync with any newer Intel CPU, like 8th Gen and up, is going to hardware transcode 4k fine. Personally I bought an HP chromebox gen 2 and threw Linux on it to run Plex then have VMs and what not on separate small form factor boxes.

I'd bet you could probably run all the services you're mentioning on something like a single USFF Optiplex but if you want to throw drives into it for storage then the towers would be the way to go.

I like the "1 liter PCs/home servers" for this kind of stuff. I have a 3 node proxmox cluster running on hp elitebook mini 800 g4's. I got them for around $120 each on ebay (prices vary). Other big manufacturers have their own mini modules (hp, lenovo, dell) Generally these have a lower price tag than something like a similar generation intel nuc because it's less of a niche market, these are used in business office environments and usually sold used pretty cheap when hardware is refreshed or businesses are closed. You can find replacement parts easily also. Just make sure they include a power adapter if you do search for one.

Mine are running i5-8500t processor which supports Intel quicksync and performs very well for video transcoding in plex. Should easily be able to do a couple of 4k transcodes easily. If you're not interested in running proxmox, this would run OMV easily and have plenty of power to run lots of containers.

I was in the same boat and recently bought a Beelink S12 Pro, which has a N100(12 gen) processor and 16GB of RAM. I added an SSD in the included bay and has been great. I just installed Debian and docker and configured those containers.

Only thing is I needed to connect to a monitor and keyboard to select the Debian USB installer in the BIOS. After setting that and ssh, it has been smooth sailing. Can recommend

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I’ve been in the same situation a few months ago (Odroid HC-1). I upgraded to a Pentium NUC7 with 16GB RAM, which has more than enough power and ram for my use. A huge improvement over the Odroid and it was pretty cheap too.