Selfhosted

Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.

This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.

I have a couple of Intel NUCs and they are great, one is the first generation NUC with the Celeron and runs Home Assistant without problems.

At the moment I am eyeing the new N100 CPUs they are pretty powerful compared to the previous generation. Asrock and Asus are bringing out motherboards with the CPU soldered and they are also fanless. The Asrock is nicer because you don't need a real PSU for it and it has an extra SATA port. They are not yet available.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/index.asp

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-n100i-d-d4/

Planning on making an unRaid miniPC

I have some (refurbished) HP mini PCs that are pretty decent, you can probably find similar things well within that range. You could also consider an off-lease/used server in that price range, but will have to do some hunting to find something you like. Also, servers can be a bit loud and power hungry (the efficiency of the compute is lower than e.g. a mini PC or a Pi, but it will have way more compute. Servers with something like dual hex core CPUs and 64+ GB of RAM are not uncommon).

I run both mini PCs and server hardware, using the server hardware mainly for storage or services that need quite high availability (auth, reverse proxy, password vault) and the mini PCs for most everything else (minecraft servers, wiki, jellyfin, etc)

I'd recommend taking a look at used small form factor PCs on eBay. I've been using one for a couple years now that came with an i7-8700 16GB of ram and an nvme SSD for about $300. Running 30+ docker containers without any issues (most are lightweight to be fair)

The only drawback to small form factor is that you have limited expansion opportunity with the unit itself. In my case I use an external NAS for storage of larger files.

ServeTheHome has a bunch of videos on YouTube about these small form factor computers.

Definitely a NUC or similar mini PC from the likes of Geekom, Beelink, or Minisforum. My whole homelab was mini PCs until I consolidated to a NUC 12 Pro as I build up my rack. Slap Proxmox on the machine, build some VMs and LXCs, and have at it.

Other than a very old laptop that acts as a DC, and my NAS, I have five Lenovo M920 (i5, 64 gigs of ram, 256 gigs SSD, and 512 gigs M2) in a XCP-NG cluster.

I used to run a Dell R710, but that got expensive with the electricity prices shooting up. So I moved to a standard consumer hardware PC in a rack mount case. Ryzen 5 5600, 64GB RAM, 500GB NVME, SSD boot disk, 6x 3.5" disks for storage. It uses half the power and is a fair bit quicker than the old dell with dual X5670 Xeons. One day I'll move to just 2x larger disks instead of 6, but that's expensive at the moment.

At the moment hardware is just expensive. I ended up with a NUC with 32gb of ram in order to future proof myself while I wait for hardware to become cheaper. Other than another stick of ram I can't see me needing to update any time soon.

Keeping storage and compute separately is the best practice but if you're OK with combining both in one device then running docker-compose on a Synology (via SSH, + versions only) works just fine. An alternative that reduces the lock-in at the expense of more tinkering is buying an amd64 QNAP and installing Openmediavault / TrueNAS / plain Debian.

I am still quite happy with my old Sun Fire X2270 M2 with Dual Xeon X5675. Not new, but its 12 physical cores, 88 GB RAM and 4 hotswap SATA drive bays in a 1U rack unit make it quite a decent machine for running a couple of VMs.

I also like my Dell T320 Rackable Tower server. It has room for 8 hotswap 3.5" SAS drives (or 16 2.5"), redundant power supply, and you should be able to get it for under $300. With a Xeon E5-1428L V2, mine is still quite capable and uses between 140 and 160 W (with 8 disks).

Mini/USFF or just MT sized boxes off ebay with 8th and 9th gen Intel CPUs. Generally around $100-150 for one.

Low power usage, and you get all the good Intel HW acceleration for transcoding video or object detection on cameras and stuff like that.

USFF/Mini if you want small, or MT if you want space for some 3.5" HDDs.

Depends who you talk to and what their objectives are. I leaned heavier on homelab side than homeserver side so I use older rack mount server, but if you’re just interested in running some services at home, nothing wrong with NUCs or desktops. Most can get you over the 32-64GB of RAM level now that you’d have ample room for activity.

I prefer the J4105 silver intels on mini itx boards, with 16GB RAM very solid setup.

I like synology NAS units with Intel chips for hosting docker containers, alongside lots of network storage. They aren't the cheapest solution but they are robust devices and i have had basically no problems since setting mine up in 2019.

Of course you can get a used dell server blade for a lot less which will be more powerful but it doesnt meet your small form factor requirement.

I use a Dell Micro with Ubuntu for docker containers mounted to a wall with a Synology NAS 4 bay for storage. I used to have a small form factor with a 12bay SAS array attached but the power consumption was ridiculous.

One of those business Thin Clients for ~150$. They are pretty much a full fledged PC that run everything you throw at it, but tiny. The only problem with mine is that the fan is a bit loud on idle.

I just built a Server using J5040 board. With 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system , 2x4tb ironwolf, all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.

Will run proxmox as first layer.

Im using refurbished thinkpads (x220-203) but i've seen a lot of homelabs using Nuc pc

You can get some decent enterprise hardware for fairly cheap on places like amazon. I got a dell R710 for around $800 a couple of years back. The equipment tends to be a little scuffed up and older in terms of hardware, but they still offer plently of performance IMO. The one I have has a 6 drive RAID with 1.5TB disks, dual 6-core processors, and 128GB of ram. Only downside I would say is they tend to use quite a bit of power (around 207W from what I've measured).

Is there any benefit in running enterprise grade server boards over a consumer build for a home server?

I am hosting several web apps (and supporting DBs/cache/object storage) and ended up just building a dedicated box using an AMD R9-5950X/64gbRAM with 1tb NVMe for cache and 3x 8tb HDDs to run Unraid across

I bought a Dell R720 rack server for less then £300 and I use it to run a whole heap of virtual machines under ProxMox, as well as a load balancer. It has 2 8 core Xeon processors, 64GB of RAM and 2TB storage so more than enough for my needs.

Definitely not small form factor though :D

The best resource imo for big home servers if you graduate using old PCs is the Homelab Discord server. They’re also at [email protected].

This happened to me too. Got a job in bioinformatics... Got really into the tech side of things and now have:

Wireguard - RPI 4 4gb dedicated which I might depreciate now I figured out how to use duckdns and port forwarding properly.

Vault - RPI 4 4gb - OMV6 w/ portainer running half a dozen containers

Docket-1 - RPI 4 4gb - portainer agent for Vault only running a Minecraft server

They all run great but I definitely need something with a bit more Welly for Minecraft. I have most of the parts for a total replacement just need to get a Ryzen 5 and done

any Intel 8 series or higher. can do hardware Plex transcoding and anything else you need

If you don't need much storage internally, I like lots of a Celeron based industrial SSF from qotom. For rack mounts, i like used Xeon-D U1-2 servers.

If I need bigger processing power for home, I like Ryzen (preferably 3000 or newer) processors in some of few ryzen entry-level server boards. They can support ECC RAM if needed.