I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
People usually forget that home machines for server require:
- stable internet connection
- stable electricity supply
- hardware maintenance
- upgrade of hardware
I had all that when I was a student, it’s wonderful to learning opportunity. Now I grew up, I use VPS in cloud and pay for all that with ~16eur/month and could be even cheaper. But considering my work hour, I can pay for that amount with half an hour of work with my job.
While I totally agree that managing hardware at home can be cumbersome, if you need large and slow amounts of storage - e.g. for torrenting o plex - VPS are too expensive. With a ~250 € investment I could get a server with 2TB HD that consumes 50W at max while the same VPS would cost me twice - if not more - for 12 months.
Yes the immediate cost is lower, but when drive fails? You need to consider some RAID setup then so that means at least 2 of them. Well depends how much your data is worth…
Also consider that computers need external battery power for short power shortage and lightning protection. At least battery requires replacement every few years.
Thank you for your comment, however, considering that renting a VPS with similar specs would cost twice, if not more, for a single year, I believe that factoring in a second drive for RAID configuration and a potential UPS (although I would not mind the downtime) is more than possible.
I’d go with something like this Lenovo M900 for $80-$90 used. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find one with a single 8GB stick, then you can get another for ~$20 and you’ve got a quad core x84-64 machine with 16GB of RAM for right around $100.
The downside would be power consumption compared to a Pi if you’re trying to fit in a severely power-constrained setup, but the M900 will draw around 11-13W idle and 55W under higher load. so it’s not bad my any means.
is there a good way to set up storage for a mini pc for something like plex or jellyfin?
I like the kimsufi offerings by OVH. You can order most servers either in France or on Canada.
Problem, I am currently living in the US
You can order a Canadian server with fairly low latency. I have one but I also have a couple of machines at home. I don’t like buying used and I care about wattage so I usually get beelinks mini PC from Amazon. They often have deals where you can have good specs for <$150, including 128gb SSDs, 8 or 16gb of ram and a 4 cores 15w CPU
Try the Oracle Cloud free tier. It’s the best price you can get for a very beefy server: 4 arm64 cores with 24 GB RAM and 250 GB storage. Just don’t put too personal data on there.
