Hi all, since ya’ll are self hosters, I’m sure you all deal with all sorts of different pieces of hardware, accessories, peripherals, and what not; just wondering if you could please share your favorite, solid, “go to” brands for overall things you need for your setup such as cables (all types), adapters, dongles, power accessories, hubs & docks, flash drives, you name it! I’m sure it varies depending on exactly what type of equipment you’re looking for but just looking for overall good brands to stick with for such things. I obviously know the main ones like Anker, Cable Matters, Ugreen, maybe Belkin, Idk. Would love to hear your recommendations! Thank you
None. One year, Lenovo has the best Linux support. Another it might not. One year, Logi makes a solid mouse. Another year they do not. One year, a company makes a great product. Another year there is a privacy scandal.
Look at what devs of the projects you use recommend, and read reviews withing 3 months of your purchase. Don’t pick a brand, pick a product.
I’ve also found TP-Link to be the best bang for the buck when it comes to home labbing. I have several of their managed switches at home, a couple almost 10 years old, and they keep on trucking.
I use a VPS for the vast majority of my stuff to be clear, but from my experiences with PC building in particular, there’s not a PSU manufacturer I’d ever want to use anymore other than EVGA. The PSU in my PC randomly started dying some months back, randomly completely cutting power when it’d go over a certain voltage draw it was rated for and could previously handle without breaking a sweat, to the point that it severely disrupted both work AND play for me, when it came to heavier work tasks or heavy games. They replaced it for me while only requiring minimal information (I think the serial numbers, information about how it was behaving, and what tasks I do with my computer so they’d know I didn’t kill it by doing insane Bitcoin mining 24/7 or other cryptocurrency stuff, which they do not cover under warranty), and not only that, but since they did not have any more of my old model available (a 750 G3), they instead gave me a newer and better one (a 750 G5).
Man thats shitty to hear. At least they fixed it! I’m having similar issues with my two usb c ports on my laptop and its been solo annoying. Just a ton of random disconnects and reconnects. I had one port completely replaced but I still have the issue from time to time.
Hey, I am very interested in the economics of self-hosting on a VPS vs building a whitebox server. As it stands, if I were to build a decent server from scratch + storage, it would cost me anywhere from $700-$1000+.
Which services do you run, and does it make sense for you to run them on the VPS? I’m thinking of just having storage at home and most of my compute in the cloud
I use a Hetzner VPS and as it stands right now I’m on their plan CX31 which costs me 9.20 EUR a month, plus additional 50 GB of storage which itself costs me an extra 2.20 EUR a month. Most of what I run on there instead of off my home computer are services I allow people other than me to use, some examples being an Akkoma instance, FreshRSS, email (using iRedMail), and a variety of game servers that come and go as me and my friends need them. Their cheapest plan has the ID CX11 and costs only 3.29 EUR a month and was actually perfect for my needs up until I started running some game servers that were a bit more heavy on CPU and RAM requirements like heavily modded Minecraft. The additional storage I mainly only started needing because of the Akkoma instance in particular, as the databases for fedi software can get very large very fast (and I’m not even caching media, it’s just text that was requiring all that storage space).
Truth be told the main reason I self-host on a VPS instead of using hardware at home is because my home internet is just not reliable enough considering I’m running services I allow other people to use. I do run some things like Plex and Jackett off my own PC where it’s just me using it (literally in the case of Jackett, more just functionally in the case of Plex since I have a small handful of close friends who I’ve given library access but who only watch stuff from my library on occasion), but that’s about it.
I will use a VPS box as a substitute for a homeserver. I have realised that I do not need much power, and having a server in the cloud is easier for me overall. Hetzner and Contabo for my budget, and I’ll look at Netcup. I’m also looking for a super cheap but reliable box to run headscale with. Overall, with a main VPS, a smaller VPS for headscale, and a small storage node, I’m looking to spend $15-$18 a month.
I think for verification I needed to send them photos of my provincial ID card (driver’s license would be fine if you had one) and that was about it, but it’s been long enough now that I don’t quite remember clearly
For network cables, FS.com. Their specialty is fiber optics and they have good transceivers and cables for really cheap prices and they also sell a tool to flash vendor info onto transceivers so if you have some picky proprietary box you can still use generic transceivers with it. Their copper products, DACs, regular cat6 patch cables, etc are good too. I haven’t tried their NICs or switches though.
my last 4 or 5 computer builds have been Asus motherboards and i;ve had great luck with them, and my mini-pcs are all Asus PN50/51 Ryzen based NUC-alikes, they are excellent. I use one as my main workstation modded into a fanless case.
I feel like their quality slipped lately however, might be part of their cost cutting before they restructured recently. will have to keep an eye on how they do in the future.
For ultra-budget laptops however, I lean towards Lenovo they have been so good to me over the years.
There was a time I’d avoid Western Digital cause everything they made fails, and I mostly leaned toward SanDisk cause they were very reliable, and well, my avoidance list got larger.
Not in my experience. I’ve never had a Hitachi that didn’t fail, and almost every WD I’ve ever had failed. Never had an issue with Seagate or Samsung before.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience historically. Of 5 Seagate drives I’ve purchased over the last decade or so, only 1 of them is still working. Meanwhile 25+ WD hard drives are still in production over the same time with only 1 that started throwing smart errors a couple years back.
Open source project device support pages are always my first stop. If you have access to a git repo for the project, use gource to visualize who is doing what and where within the project recently. This will make it obvious what hardware the main devs are invested in the most, and therefore what will have the best support and user experience.
Awesome, good to hear. Another brand I’ve heard mentioned before as a good one too. There’s so much junk on Amazon, it can be sorta hard wading through all the crap to find the good ones lol
First and foremost, well-grounded power is essential. I haven’t done the whole house thing yet, but I am thinking about it and curious to know of other’s stories.
For surge protectors, I like GE wall taps for form factor and Furman racks when there is space & need.
For an uninterruptible power supply, I like APC. While they aren’t made in the USA like they used to (RIP), they have been reliable for me.
Network (ISP Modem, WIFI, Switch) and tower CPU are all driven by UPS power. APC UPS, at least, is always drawing off the battery, so the upstream electronics are protected…a massive surge is far more likely to take out the battery. For laptops, surge protection is enough.
I have not yet surge-protected the ISP lower power input… this is a real risk! I found a cheap one off Amazon, but I am worried it will degrade the network --> whole house may be better.
Note - I have had a lightning strike get sent down the cable line, enter the home, blow out the cable modem, traverse into the network switch, blow out the switch, and nuke every active ethernet port (NAS, Apple TV, etc.), as well as jump the wire into low power security, physically blowing a hard-wired security panel off the wall and damaging a few hard-wired security points. Pretty crazy!
Holy crap thats crazy! Are simple things like surge protectors pretty much equal? Is there a point in researching brands for such a presumably simple thing?
Depends, it’s all a gamble. Think of it like this … how much do you spend on your kit? A top end GPU is $1500 USD. A decent surge protector might cost $15. However suppose you cheap out and get one for $9.99…then a surge blows thru it and smokes your mobo&gpu. how much did that $5 in savings cost you?
there is quite a bit that goes into it. And yet it’s not magic. Also, protection does wear out as load & surge is applied. So it’s not really worth it to pay top end, over and over, at least imo.
Both Anker and Ugreen does good GAN chargers, but Anker is bad at doing good cables (2 of 3 usbc to usbc cable failed during the first year of use). I only had 1 cable from Ugreen, and I don’t use it often, so I can’t tell if they are good yet.
Other than that I don’t have much to say about small electronics, except maybe avoid Asus Laptops. Got 3 of them during my lifetime, all got pretty big problems, ranging from bad screens to dead touchpad and motherboards. They even forgot to connect the internal audio cable during the motherboard replacement, had to sent it back a second time 😅.
Haha yes!!! Same here with Asus laptops. I’ve gone through two and had issues with both. Mainly touchpad issues. But that’s surprising to hear your stance on anker cables. Tbh I’ve found all usb c cables to be SUPER finicky thus far. Like sometimes just the slightest movement of the cable and it automatically disconnects. Heck one time my cat simple stepped on a cable and it caused a disconnection smh very annoying stuff
May be a bad usbc port on one end. My old Nokia 8.1 was known to have a bad usbc connector (mine was impacted), and I ended up switching smarphone because of that. Now I’m waiting for my new phone once again (Fairphone 5), at least this one is easier to repair 😅
Yea I’ve definitely had issues with my usb c ports on my laptop. The shitty thing is, my laptop ONLY has two ports, both being usb c. They’ve become loose over the years of wear and tear and I had a shop manage to replace one and he said the other is perfectly fine. I mean he had a tester and showed me the voltage or amperage and the ports work, but they are still so finicky. As mentioned, just the slightest little movement of a cable or flash drive and they disconnect and then reconnect. Super annoying. I can’t wait to get a dock so I dont have to depend on just these two usb ports and all the annoying adapters and such
Servers: Supermicro. Dell in a pinch
Switches: HPE Aruba for 10gig, or Mellanox for 100gig
Routers: I’m not that picky, but I use Fortigate as I scavenged some leftovers at work
UPS: Eaton
Network cards: Intel for 10gig, IBM for 8 or 16gig, Mellanox for 100gig
Harddrives: Exos
RAID stuff: LSI MegaRaid.
GPU: Don’t really care, but I have a bunch of NVidia Quadro.
Most of the above preferences are due to scavenging leftover hardware at work.
Wow wow wow, you guys are light years ahead of me in the equipment department. I plan to learn and utilize a lot of that stuff but I was more interested in the smaller everyday things like chargers, cables, flash drives, adapters, etc lol still great info though. I was super intruided by supermicros server selection when I went down that rabbit hole. Truth is, I’m not nearly ready for a server yet.
Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!
Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.
EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.
Thanks! I certainly do plan to venture into servers, but its a tad too confusing ATM as I’m currently trying to learn other things and projects right now. Homelabbing is definitely a future plan and goal of mine :)
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None. One year, Lenovo has the best Linux support. Another it might not. One year, Logi makes a solid mouse. Another year they do not. One year, a company makes a great product. Another year there is a privacy scandal.
Look at what devs of the projects you use recommend, and read reviews withing 3 months of your purchase. Don’t pick a brand, pick a product.
Thank you
Networking I really like TP-Link with their Omada range. It’s like Ubiquity.
Spinning Disk drives I always go Hitachi now.
USB thumb drives SanDisk have been pretty good for me.
Cables I like Ugreen, chargers I like Anker.
Perfect! Thank you
I’ve also found TP-Link to be the best bang for the buck when it comes to home labbing. I have several of their managed switches at home, a couple almost 10 years old, and they keep on trucking.
I use a VPS for the vast majority of my stuff to be clear, but from my experiences with PC building in particular, there’s not a PSU manufacturer I’d ever want to use anymore other than EVGA. The PSU in my PC randomly started dying some months back, randomly completely cutting power when it’d go over a certain voltage draw it was rated for and could previously handle without breaking a sweat, to the point that it severely disrupted both work AND play for me, when it came to heavier work tasks or heavy games. They replaced it for me while only requiring minimal information (I think the serial numbers, information about how it was behaving, and what tasks I do with my computer so they’d know I didn’t kill it by doing insane Bitcoin mining 24/7 or other cryptocurrency stuff, which they do not cover under warranty), and not only that, but since they did not have any more of my old model available (a 750 G3), they instead gave me a newer and better one (a 750 G5).
Man thats shitty to hear. At least they fixed it! I’m having similar issues with my two usb c ports on my laptop and its been solo annoying. Just a ton of random disconnects and reconnects. I had one port completely replaced but I still have the issue from time to time.
Hey, I am very interested in the economics of self-hosting on a VPS vs building a whitebox server. As it stands, if I were to build a decent server from scratch + storage, it would cost me anywhere from $700-$1000+.
Which services do you run, and does it make sense for you to run them on the VPS? I’m thinking of just having storage at home and most of my compute in the cloud
I use a Hetzner VPS and as it stands right now I’m on their plan CX31 which costs me 9.20 EUR a month, plus additional 50 GB of storage which itself costs me an extra 2.20 EUR a month. Most of what I run on there instead of off my home computer are services I allow people other than me to use, some examples being an Akkoma instance, FreshRSS, email (using iRedMail), and a variety of game servers that come and go as me and my friends need them. Their cheapest plan has the ID CX11 and costs only 3.29 EUR a month and was actually perfect for my needs up until I started running some game servers that were a bit more heavy on CPU and RAM requirements like heavily modded Minecraft. The additional storage I mainly only started needing because of the Akkoma instance in particular, as the databases for fedi software can get very large very fast (and I’m not even caching media, it’s just text that was requiring all that storage space).
Truth be told the main reason I self-host on a VPS instead of using hardware at home is because my home internet is just not reliable enough considering I’m running services I allow other people to use. I do run some things like Plex and Jackett off my own PC where it’s just me using it (literally in the case of Jackett, more just functionally in the case of Plex since I have a small handful of close friends who I’ve given library access but who only watch stuff from my library on occasion), but that’s about it.
I will use a VPS box as a substitute for a homeserver. I have realised that I do not need much power, and having a server in the cloud is easier for me overall. Hetzner and Contabo for my budget, and I’ll look at Netcup. I’m also looking for a super cheap but reliable box to run headscale with. Overall, with a main VPS, a smaller VPS for headscale, and a small storage node, I’m looking to spend $15-$18 a month.
How is the verification process for Hetzner?
I think for verification I needed to send them photos of my provincial ID card (driver’s license would be fine if you had one) and that was about it, but it’s been long enough now that I don’t quite remember clearly
deleted by creator
Ahh good to know. Adding to the list lol I’ve heard the name mentioned a few times but never really looked into their stuff. Thanks
For network cables, FS.com. Their specialty is fiber optics and they have good transceivers and cables for really cheap prices and they also sell a tool to flash vendor info onto transceivers so if you have some picky proprietary box you can still use generic transceivers with it. Their copper products, DACs, regular cat6 patch cables, etc are good too. I haven’t tried their NICs or switches though.
I have never heard of them! Thank you
Asus. Seems to always be quality.
my last 4 or 5 computer builds have been Asus motherboards and i;ve had great luck with them, and my mini-pcs are all Asus PN50/51 Ryzen based NUC-alikes, they are excellent. I use one as my main workstation modded into a fanless case.
I feel like their quality slipped lately however, might be part of their cost cutting before they restructured recently. will have to keep an eye on how they do in the future.
For ultra-budget laptops however, I lean towards Lenovo they have been so good to me over the years.
Bought 3 laptop from them, all had QA issues. Never again.
My only Asus hardware that works with no issue is my current access point.
Yep. I’m sure they’ve made some duds, but they are my go to brand. Have been impressed in one way or another with everything I’ve had from them.
My number two is Lenovo.
For smaller things I’m a fan of Anker, and I admit for cables I usually just find something cheapish on Amazon that gets good reviews.
They just laid off a shit ton of employees and the RMA has gone downhill recently. Shame evga are not around in the gpu space.
That’s always a recommended brand. Never had much luck with their laptops, but had a real old Asus router that I liked.
Whatever’s cheapest lol
There was a time I’d avoid Western Digital cause everything they made fails, and I mostly leaned toward SanDisk cause they were very reliable, and well, my avoidance list got larger.
Western Digital owns SanDisk now fyi
That’s the joke.
Isn’t Western Digital one of the more reliable hard drive manufacturers?
Not in my experience. I’ve never had a Hitachi that didn’t fail, and almost every WD I’ve ever had failed. Never had an issue with Seagate or Samsung before.
There’s your individual experience, but I’m basing my statement on Backblaze’s annual drive failure rate reports.
Hmm I always though western digital was pretty decent for hard drives?
They are. Follow the backblaze drive failure reports for quality checks.
I’ve had the exact opposite experience historically. Of 5 Seagate drives I’ve purchased over the last decade or so, only 1 of them is still working. Meanwhile 25+ WD hard drives are still in production over the same time with only 1 that started throwing smart errors a couple years back.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #107 for this sub, first seen 5th Sep 2023, 03:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
good info! I am interested in NUCs just not quite yet ;)
Open source project device support pages are always my first stop. If you have access to a git repo for the project, use gource to visualize who is doing what and where within the project recently. This will make it obvious what hardware the main devs are invested in the most, and therefore what will have the best support and user experience.
https://gource.io/
Wow that is amazing, thanks for sharing.
Server rack and shelves: NavePoint. Amazing customer support; great products.
My Satechi dongle has been pretty solid as a pass through for my MacBook. No issues so far.
Awesome, good to hear. Another brand I’ve heard mentioned before as a good one too. There’s so much junk on Amazon, it can be sorta hard wading through all the crap to find the good ones lol
deleted by creator
Remember power!
First and foremost, well-grounded power is essential. I haven’t done the whole house thing yet, but I am thinking about it and curious to know of other’s stories.
For surge protectors, I like GE wall taps for form factor and Furman racks when there is space & need.
For an uninterruptible power supply, I like APC. While they aren’t made in the USA like they used to (RIP), they have been reliable for me.
Network (ISP Modem, WIFI, Switch) and tower CPU are all driven by UPS power. APC UPS, at least, is always drawing off the battery, so the upstream electronics are protected…a massive surge is far more likely to take out the battery. For laptops, surge protection is enough.
I have not yet surge-protected the ISP lower power input… this is a real risk! I found a cheap one off Amazon, but I am worried it will degrade the network --> whole house may be better.
Note - I have had a lightning strike get sent down the cable line, enter the home, blow out the cable modem, traverse into the network switch, blow out the switch, and nuke every active ethernet port (NAS, Apple TV, etc.), as well as jump the wire into low power security, physically blowing a hard-wired security panel off the wall and damaging a few hard-wired security points. Pretty crazy!
Holy crap thats crazy! Are simple things like surge protectors pretty much equal? Is there a point in researching brands for such a presumably simple thing?
Depends, it’s all a gamble. Think of it like this … how much do you spend on your kit? A top end GPU is $1500 USD. A decent surge protector might cost $15. However suppose you cheap out and get one for $9.99…then a surge blows thru it and smokes your mobo&gpu. how much did that $5 in savings cost you?
there is quite a bit that goes into it. And yet it’s not magic. Also, protection does wear out as load & surge is applied. So it’s not really worth it to pay top end, over and over, at least imo.
Awesome thanks. What about the smaller stuff though??? Any personal preference?
Both Anker and Ugreen does good GAN chargers, but Anker is bad at doing good cables (2 of 3 usbc to usbc cable failed during the first year of use). I only had 1 cable from Ugreen, and I don’t use it often, so I can’t tell if they are good yet.
Other than that I don’t have much to say about small electronics, except maybe avoid Asus Laptops. Got 3 of them during my lifetime, all got pretty big problems, ranging from bad screens to dead touchpad and motherboards. They even forgot to connect the internal audio cable during the motherboard replacement, had to sent it back a second time 😅.
Haha yes!!! Same here with Asus laptops. I’ve gone through two and had issues with both. Mainly touchpad issues. But that’s surprising to hear your stance on anker cables. Tbh I’ve found all usb c cables to be SUPER finicky thus far. Like sometimes just the slightest movement of the cable and it automatically disconnects. Heck one time my cat simple stepped on a cable and it caused a disconnection smh very annoying stuff
May be a bad usbc port on one end. My old Nokia 8.1 was known to have a bad usbc connector (mine was impacted), and I ended up switching smarphone because of that. Now I’m waiting for my new phone once again (Fairphone 5), at least this one is easier to repair 😅
Yea I’ve definitely had issues with my usb c ports on my laptop. The shitty thing is, my laptop ONLY has two ports, both being usb c. They’ve become loose over the years of wear and tear and I had a shop manage to replace one and he said the other is perfectly fine. I mean he had a tester and showed me the voltage or amperage and the ports work, but they are still so finicky. As mentioned, just the slightest little movement of a cable or flash drive and they disconnect and then reconnect. Super annoying. I can’t wait to get a dock so I dont have to depend on just these two usb ports and all the annoying adapters and such
Servers: Supermicro. Dell in a pinch
Switches: HPE Aruba for 10gig, or Mellanox for 100gig
Routers: I’m not that picky, but I use Fortigate as I scavenged some leftovers at work
UPS: Eaton
Network cards: Intel for 10gig, IBM for 8 or 16gig, Mellanox for 100gig
Harddrives: Exos
RAID stuff: LSI MegaRaid.
GPU: Don’t really care, but I have a bunch of NVidia Quadro.
Most of the above preferences are due to scavenging leftover hardware at work.
Wow wow wow, you guys are light years ahead of me in the equipment department. I plan to learn and utilize a lot of that stuff but I was more interested in the smaller everyday things like chargers, cables, flash drives, adapters, etc lol still great info though. I was super intruided by supermicros server selection when I went down that rabbit hole. Truth is, I’m not nearly ready for a server yet.
Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!
Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.
EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.
Thanks! I certainly do plan to venture into servers, but its a tad too confusing ATM as I’m currently trying to learn other things and projects right now. Homelabbing is definitely a future plan and goal of mine :)
Damn son, are you me back when I worked at a MSP? Good taste in gear 💪😎💪
Nah, I work for a geophysical company with a bunch of storage clusters and data crunchers around the world.