Hi friends. I’m a newbie in self-hosting, though I’ve been managing (virtual) linux servers at work for a couple of years. I’m completely ignorant on the hardware choices out there, hopefully you can point me to the right direction.
Here are my requisites:
- Low power consumption, I plan to have it connected 24/7 and I’m kinda concerned on how much it will impact the electricity bill
- Ethernet port, preferably gigabit but whatever
- Graphical performance is not important as I don’t plan to connect it to any display. As long as I can ssh into it, I’m good.
Services I plan on installing, for starters:
- casaOS
- pi-hole, or equivalent
- Home Assistant
- Kitchen Owl (nice to have)
- Paperless-ngx (nice to have)
I live in europe and my budget is around 80 euros or so. Thanks in advance!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LHvT2fRp7I6Hf18LcSzsNnjp10VI-odvwZpQZKv_NCI/
It’s in German but you get the idea
My whole “homelab” is made of either things I literally found in the trash, hand-me downs and 2nd part stuff I got for extremely cheap. It’s no speed deamon, but it’s got 8cores, 16GB ram and gigabit… What I’m trying to say is, that is most likely also an option for you and there is no reason to buy the latest and greatest of hardware for running simple things like pi-hole. As for the electricity bill, unless you’re running something computationally intensive 24/7 or just a ton of hard drives, I wouldn’t worry about it.
+1 for CasaOS! The simplest and best I’ve tried.
Lots of good suggestions here already but nobodys mentioned the Asrock A300 DeskMini. Low power consumption and you could probably find one for pretty cheap.
Obviously an old laptop you don’t use anymore is a great and affordable choice too. Comes with a built-in battery backup!
A refurbished elite desk sff PC works great.
Just got one for $100 on r/hardwareswap (yes I still visit reddit, but I can’t give up hardwareswap) a couple weeks ago
I just got a mini AMD box from CWWK off Amazon and I’m quite impressed. I even got a free CPU upgrade (ordered a 5600u but received 5825u)
