Is it a bad idea to use my desktop to self host?
What are the disadvantages?? Can they be overcome?
I use it primarily for programming, sometimes gaming and browsing.
It’s a terrible idea - do it anyway. Experimentation is how we learn.
If you have a reasonably modern multi-core system you probably won’t even notice a performance hit. The biggest drawback is that you have a single thing that is holding all your eggs. So if an upgrade goes wrong, or you’re taking things down for maintenance then everything is affected. And there can be conflicts between required versions of libraries, OS, etc. that each service needs.
Separating services, even logically, is a good idea. So I’d recommend you use containers or VMs to make it easier to just “whelp, that didn’t work” and throw everything away or start from scratch. It also makes library dependencies much easier to deal with.
So I already host a lot of stuff on a raspberry pi 4B. But when I tried to host Jellyfin, encoding was trouble on it, so I used my desktop to host Jellyfin as a quick solution, but using sshfs from the raspberry pi to access the media files. So now I wonder, is it worth it moving Jellyfin to something else? Is it worth it moving the media files to the desktop?
Is it performing well as is? sshfs isn’t very high performance, but if it’s working it’s fine - nfs would likely perform better though. I run jellyfin in a vm with an nfs mount to my file server and it works fine. Interface is zippy and scanning doesn’t take too long. I don’t get GPU acceleration but the CPU on that system (10th gen i7 I think) is fast enough that I haven’t had much trouble with transcoding (yet).
It’s actually not bad, surprisingly. I have had issues sometimes, but they’re network issues related to my router. I haven’t had them in a while.
It’ll effect performance. It will need to be always on. It risks having interaction between your normal applications and server services. Also all your eggs in one basket if something goes wrong. That said it shoul be fine. Just take frequent snapshots and backups for important data
If you are going to use your desktop, I would suggest putting all of the self-hosted services into a VM.
This means if you decide you do want to move it over to dedicated hardware later on, you just migrate the VM to the new host.
This is how I started out before I had a dedicated server box (refurb office PC repurposed to a hypervisor).
Then host whatever/however you want to on the VM.
I mean, I use a regular desktop computer that I just installed Ubuntu on and plugged it into an ethernet cable in the closet and closed the door. Now it’s my server. RGB and all.
By hosting services on your desktop, you are increasing your threat surface. Every additional software that you run increases your potential to catch malware. It also requires powering a beefy machine 24/7 to keep the service up, when in reality anything that isn’t a media server can run on 3rd gen Intel CPUs that have relatively low TDP.
conversely you could also run them on a low end chip of a current/recent gen and get even lower power draw for equivalent or better performance
