Hi all,
I want to spin up a small home server. Nothing crazy, maybe 4 or 8GB ram at most. 1 Docker instance running a few privacy frontends (Invidious, Redlib, Xcancel, SearxNG, etc.) and split tunneling VPN connections for each one.
Obviously, a Raspberry Pi 4 or higher is the internet’s favorite choice, but I don’t need wireless connectivity, I just need a single HDMI and 2 USB ports to get everything set up, one ethernet port, and a dream in my heart.
Has anyone use alternatives like Le Potato or Orange Pi? I’m curious what their community support is like, and if there’s a FOSS-friendly standard.
Thanks!
If you don’t mind some low specs, and are focused on lowest price, a potato pi runs for about $30 IIRC, and is plenty to do small stuff like an openvpn server.
As others mentioned used SFF PCs, here’s my recommendation based on my own experience.
I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They’re tiny, silent (no fan) and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter (PCIe A/E key -> M key) in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them (that was before prices went nuts).
Beware, only if you pick the right dual ranked RAM modules (e.g. Patriot PSD416G26662S), you can have a max. of 2x16 GB. To start your journey, 4 or 8 GB might just be enough and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers and lxc, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average. Dunno about current prices though.It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Maybe it fits your needs as well?8 watts… That’s RPi territory but with lots more actual horsepower when needed, in a useful package.
I love the concept of the Pi, but this stuff is so hard to compete with.
This was just posted to selfhosted, and does a great job showing what RPi is competing with.
It’s a tool for seeing actual idle wattage draw for a lot of mini-PCs.
Many are in the single-digit idle power - the RPi claim to fame - but have a lot more capability than Pi, plus come in useful packages.
Just thought it would be a useful link for here.
Dell 3060 Micro.
Used micro PC is often the best deal. Companies offload old SFF i5 and lower machines all the time. They’re all over eBay.
I used to be of the erroneous mind set that a server had to be some big honkin’, dim the lights, piece of equipment, but that’s not necessarily true now days with modern architecture. Doesn’t take a lot to get a lot back.
Dude same. Back in the day I was dead set on getting older blades and a couple Dell 710 in a rack and “that’s what a real homelab is.”
Now, I still got the rack because I think they look cool, but it’s all decommissioned workstations, a white box unRaid server, and micro/mini PCs; there’s not a single traditional server box in place.
I’m shocked with what I’ve been able to do with an old Dell SFF desktop.
Upgraded to 48GB of ram it’s running ESXi hosting a couple Debian VMs, a DietPi VM, 3 Windows VMs, a massive data drive, idles under 20w and peaks at 80w when I’m doing video conversion.
At this point I’m shopping for some old mini PCs to run the VMs as independent servers because their idle power is so low.
I actually have one of these: Dell Optiplex 3020 Micro
Has a 16 GB RAM max. Doesn’t come with HDMI but you can utilize one of these VGA/HDMI or Display port /HDMI
Surprisingly snappy little machines. Drop in another 8 GB stick of RAM for $25 and you’re off to the races.
Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 maxed out to 32 gb RAM are pretty nice too and can be found on Amazon for around $125.
Gonna second the dell optiplex. Been using one for my home server for a while now, and it’s been perfect.
Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren’t the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they’re also more power efficient.
As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.
Get a NUC or old laptop and install your distro of choice on it. Much less hassle than barely supported ARM boards with ancient kernels.
Also to consider are NUCs. I for one got a Firebat with N100 and 8 or 16 GB of RAM and it was already a few years ago cheaper than a RPi 4.
N100 CPU beats any SBC in every aspect except maybe power? Still very low consumption tho. This will leave you headroom for years of selfhosting, because once you get going, there is no coming back.
Nothing more valuable in privacy terms than keeping your photos off the cloud (immich), then data off the cloud (copyparty, nextcloud,…). It never stops and the n100 will support that no problem.
N100/N150 doesn’t use that much more power and going for x64 instead of ARM could be a pretty big benefit too. Depends on what you want of course.
Awesome idea, thanks! I want something that can spend 99% of the time just hiding behind other consoles, and this would work perfectly for that.
Personally, I shuffle photos from my phone to my laptop and then backup manually, which is not awesome. Having my own cloud-based backups for that would be great. Might even get my partner to go for it, which is the hard sell.
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Scrounge an old laptop, maybe super cheap if the screen isn’t completely working. Plug in a monitor to deal with screen problems.
Yeah the best option is the old PC you already have. Unless you’re transcoding video or into LLMs it will be more than enough.
Power demand on an old laptop might actually cost you more in the long run.
How many cents per month would you estimate? Would it break the bank?
1 to 2€ a month is a fair baseline IMO.
You won’t get under that with a raspberry either without deep tinkering (tinkering you can apply to a laptop too ofc).
Around £100 a year from 50w, if you run this for several years then you tell me if that matters.
Yeah don’t get a server-laptop lol.
Yeah, that’s my fallback idea. I would sort of prefer the ease of a single board option I can just shove behind the router, but this might be easier.
Note that I have seen a lot of people make some really cool “rehousings” of their laptops to turn them into transparent boxes mounted to the wall, usually made of something like acrylic. They look awesome, but haven’t tried it myself since I just self-host using my laptop in its original chassis
If you dont need an sbc or something arm based mini pcs/thin clients/laptops work well. I run redlib, yamtrack and a monero node on hp t630 w/ 16GB ram (bought before the rampocalypse for ~ $60) and a torrent seedbox/streaming nas on wyse 3040 (~$10). Here’s a great website about thin clients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
Thanks - I think a NUC/thin client will be how I end up going. I just didn’t even think about them in terms of meeting the criteria of “small thing I can leave running and not care about.” I think I still have an old laptop my partner used to use that would work, which might be my tester.
I was looking at bee-link a while back, shame prices have gone through the roof on everything though.
Yeah I grabbed a… Mele quieter or something back in November to replace the noisy greenpower thing I’d had for about 2 years and I got a bit more back than what I spent on it, looking at the mele tiny pc today and it’s doubled in price since I got it. So far it’s been nice though, passive cooling unlike the noisy fan on the other one.
I have a 16GB ram HP t630 running vaultwarden (bought for £50) and some other stuff and a HP ProDesk 400 G5 16GB ram (bought for £100) running jellyfin & immich. They’re great. I also have a Wyse 3040 that I intend to run as pihole, just haven’t got round to it yet.
Have a look at DietPi. That is a single-board-computer optimized Linux distribution that, in contradiction to what the name might suggest, runs on (almost) all of the SBC’s out there. It has stripped away all the things you don’t need and only installs and loads what is needed to run the software you choose, resulting in a very lightweight but powerful operating system for these kinds of devices. It has its own software catalog with a broad selection of optimized software, but you can of course install anything you want. Ive been running this on a Raxda Rock4 without any problems, and would definitely suggest this even on a Raspberry over the regular Pi image.
Plus one for Dietpi here. It really simplified installing all my services on a Pi Zero, and it’s available for most chinese SBC brands and x86 too. If I can find an used thin client for 60 euros with low shipping costs I’ll definitely use Dietpi.
Dietpi is a great suggestion.
Running rpi4 + pihole on dietpi for years now. It is overkill but solid. Updates thru SSH…easy does it.
Will do, thanks!
Used Lenovo mini PCs are nice (m720q for example)
Or for example the Futro S740 if you do not need the power of the m720q
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PoE Power over Ethernet RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SBC Single-Board Computer SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 16 acronyms.
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I’ve used a RockPro64 and a Rock Pi 4 for that purpose before. They do it quite well.
The main reason people recommend Raspberry Pi’s when talking SBCs is the software support (OS choices) and comminity size.
No one in the SBC industry beats Raspberry Pi at those things, and they can be quite important ones.
