Keep power in mind. For most home-use services, you don’t really need much computing power, and you might be able to do all you want with a single box. Even 30W, 24/7 is $25 (@10¢/kWh)-125(@50¢)/year of electricity. That said, it’s a small price to learn how to do clustering or swarms.
I’d guess that your biggest load would be transcoding in Jellyfin, for which Intel Gen 6 added h265 to quicksync. The Gen 3/4 CPUs in M73 would be extra slow with most modern codecs.



I added homeassistant and some power monitors to my stack, and the IT rack comes in around 1.5 kWh/day - one of the biggest power budgets in the house, even with a low-power CPU, after adding in a few HDDs, a couple switches, and the cable modem. I’m also in a cheap power state, so it’s not a financial pressure, just surprising how quickly 10W here, 10W there…add up. At $0.50/kWh, I’d think solar would be a no-brainer.