I’m sure a lot of people’s self hosting journey started on junk hardware… “try it out”, followed by “oh this is cool” followed by “omg I could do this, that and that” followed by dumping that hand-me-down garbage hardware you were using for something new and shiny specifically for the server.

My unRAID journey was this exactly. I now have a 12 hot/swap bay rack mounted case, with a Ryzan 9 multi core, ECC ram, but it started out with my ‘old’ PC with a few old/small HDDs

Testing federation from my shit hardware… 😅

The oldest hardware I’m still using is an Intel Core i5-6500 with 48GB of RAM running our Palworld server. I have an upgrade in the pipeline to help with the lag, because the CPU is constantly stressed, but it still will run game servers.

I faced that only with different editions of Windows limiting it by itself.

N…not quite…

Running a bunch of services here on a i3 PC I built for my wife back in 2010. I’ve since upgraded the RAM to 16GB, added as many hard drives as there are SATA ports on the mobo, re-bedded the heatsink, etc.

It’s pretty much always ran on Debian, but all services are on Docker these days so the base distro doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

I’d like to get a good backup solution going for it so I can actually use it for important data, but realistically I’m probably just going to replace it with a NAS at some point.

Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you’re lucky and it’s not a limit of that architecture.

If that won’t work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

I’ve worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you’ll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture’s maximum memory.

Granted, if a single service whose load can’t be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you’re stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.

Not anymore. My main self-hosting server is an i7 5960x with 32GB of ECC RAM, RTX 4060, 1TB SATA SSD, and 6x6TB 7200RPM drives.

I did used to host some services on like a $5 or $10 a month VPS, and then eventually a $40 a month dedi, though.

I run a local LLM on my gaming computer thats like a decade old now with an old 1070ti 8GB VRAM card. It does a good job running mistral small 22B at 3t/s which I think is pretty good. But any tech enthusiast into LLMs look at those numbers and probably wonder how I can stand such a slow token speed. I look at their multi card data center racks with 5x 4090s and wonder how the hell they can afford it.

I’m still interested in Self-Hosting but I actually tried getting into self-hosting a year or so ago. I bought a s***** desktop computer from Walmart, and installed window server 2020 on it to try to practice on that.

Thought I could use it to put some bullet points on my resume, and maybe get into self hosting later with next cloud. I ended up not fully following through because I felt like I needed to first buy new editions of the server administration and network infrastructure textbooks I had learned from a decade prior, before I could continue with giving it an FQDN, setting it up as a primary DNS Server, or pointing it at one, and etc.

So it was only accessible on my LAN, because I was afraid of making it a remotely accessible server unless I knew I had good firewall rules, and had set up the primary DNS server correctly, and ultimately just never finished setting it up. The most ever accomplished was getting it working as a file server for personal storage, and creating local accounts with usernames and passwords for both myself and my mom, whom I was living with at the time. It could authenticate remote access through our local Wi-Fi, but I never got further.

Does this count ARMv6 256MB RAM running OpenMediaVault…hmm I have to fix my clock. LOL

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn’t have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn’t subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn’t going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn’t justify its continued operation.

My home server runs on an old desktop PC, bought at a discounter. But as we have bought several identical ones, we have both parts to upgrade them (RAM!) as well as organ donors for everything else.

It’s not absolutely shit, it’s a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn’t working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it’s now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don’t know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it’s not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can’t remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.