I’ve been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I’m so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?
My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:
- 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
- 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
- 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
- 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing…? or nextcloud?)
- potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
- potential email hosting (distant future)
anyways with that all said i have a few questions:
- what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
- any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer
Do not go for server hardware, used consumer hardware is good enough for you use cases. Basically any machine from the last 5-10 yeare is powerfull enough to handle the load.
Most difficult decision is on the GPU or transcoding hardware for your jellyfin. Do you want to be power efficient? Then go with a modern but low end intel CPU there you got quicksync as transcoding engine. If not, i would go for a low end NVIDIA GPU like the 1050ti or a newer one, and for example an old AMD CPU like the 3600.
For storage, also depends on budged. Having a backup of your data is much more important then having redundancy. You do not need to backup your media, but everything that is important to you,lime the photos in immich etc.
I would go SSD since you do not need much storage, a seperate 500 GB drive for your OS and a 4 TB one for the data. This is much more compact and reduces power consumption, and especially for read heavy applications much more durable and faster inoperation, less noise etc.
Ofc, HDDs are good enough for your usecase and cheaper (factor 2.5-3x cheaper here) .
Probably 8-16 GB RAM would be more then enough.
For any local redundancy or RAID i would always go ZFS.
QuickSync is more than sufficient for most users. It can handle several concurrent 4K transcode. It’s also not that common to have to transcode, unless you stream your media content when away from home a lot, and have poor upload speed.
If going Intel, there’s different models of Intel iGPU, so I’d go for the lowest-end GPU that has the higher end iGPU. My home server is a few years old and has an Intel Core i5 13500. The difference between the 13400 and 13500 looks small on paper, but the 13400 only has UHD Graphics 730 while the 13500 had UHD Graphics 770 which can handle double the number of concurrent transcodes.
Intel iGPUs also support SR-IOV which lets you share one iGPU across multiple VMs. For example, if you have a Plex server on the host Linux system, and Blue Iris in a Windows Server VM, and both need to use hardware transcoding.
I’ve heard AMD’s onboard graphics are pretty good these days, but I haven’t tried AMD CPUs on a server.
The main issue is afaik still the software support, here are NVIDIA and Intel years ahead.
The benefit of going with a dGPU is that in a few years when for example maybe AV1 takes even more off, you can just switch the GPU and you’re done and do not have to swap the whole system. That at least was my thinking on my setup. My CPU, a 3600x is still good for another 10 years probably.
I know this was just an example, but Intel 11th gen and newer has hardware acceleration for AV1.
GPUs have their place, but they significantly increase power consumption, which is an issue in areas with high power prices.