Hi any suggestions on what I could buy as a small home server? I would like to self host Jellyfin, my website and maybe NextCloud (I wanted to try) I saw an Intel NUC on Amazon but I’m not sure
@SonoMichele I probably wouldn't recommend hosting your website at home. But for jellyfin and nextcloud I'm using an HP Microserver - about the same price as a decent Intel NUC but obviously a lot bigger too.
I've got 4 VMs running off it doing various tasks. It works well.
@pswilde maybe I’ll just create a new static website and host it with gitlab pages. But I would like to be able to use NextCloud also outside home (maybe with a vpn?). I also forgot to say the price, I would like between 300-400€
@SonoMichele I'm sure you expected this, but the new Raspberry Pi models (4, IIRC) are completely capable. I don't know what Jellyfin is, but it can run nginx (idk about apache) and php just fine, so NextCloud should run too.
Old models might do it too, for a far lower price point (we're talking maybe 40 bucks), but I can't guarantee anything for the performance.
@SonoMichele 40€ Isn't a high risk to take tho... ;)
@tobtobxx Jellyfin is a media server like plex. And now 40€ isn’t that big difference hahaha so it’s ok
@SonoMichele A used i5 desktop with enough sata ports.
It's impossible to beat for value and you save a machine from the landfill.
@bhart i don’t know where to find used computers here in Italy, never bought something used because a lot of time here they just try to scam you
@SonoMichele oh interesting. I would head for eBay here in US. I'm admittedly ignorant outside US. Good luck then
@SonoMichele Raspberry Pi fan here, but it very much depends on your intended workload now and later. I've seen plenty of folk using Nextcloud on their Pi 4's.
@proactiveservices I would be the only one using it and not really so often. The thing that I’m concerned about is Jellyfin, I don’t really know much but a guy said that streaming media won’t be very good
@SonoMichele I haven't read of Jellyfin on Pi specifically, but I know that using them for streaming boxes is also a fairly popular use-case. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/ will likely have some useful posts.
@proactiveservices thank you I’ll have a look at that
@SonoMichele Regarding Nextcloud, I easily run it on a Raspberry Pi 4. I also run Jellyfin on an i5 NUC, and it often pegs one of my cores when it's transcoding.
@tompurl so I guess I won’t be able to run Jellyfin and NextCloud on the same rasp 4
@SonoMichele I haven't tried it but I have to imagine you would have a few problems. But at least it's cheap to experiment with those things! I'm often surprised by how well some of my projects run on a Raspberry Pi.
@tompurl yeah I think I’ll buy a rasp 4 and if doesn’t run both I’ll use it to experiment things
@SonoMichele Also I don't mean to spam you but what you're doing is *exactly* what I just finished doing :-) Here's some notes I took on setting up my IPFire system:
- https://blog.tompurl.com/how-i-learned-to-avoid-usb-ethernet-adapters-the-hard-way
Good luck!
@tompurl I’ll save that for later, thank you!
@SonoMichele
My biggest 2020 project was actually running a public Nextcloud instance on my home network. It was a non-trivial investment of time and money but it was also very fun.
I ended up installing IPFire on a used HP Elitedesk 705 G3 SFF (~ $120) and using that as my router so I could easily setup a proper DMZ network. I also bought a decent 2-port ethernet card, which added about $60.
I then installed Nextcloud on a Raspberry PI 4 (~ $80 total) in my DMZ network and it's worked very well for me.
@tompurl a day I would like to those things too haha
@SonoMichele just to come up with the most boring suggestion ever: just a random old laptop lying around?
My 2007 macbook with an external hard drive is probably overdoing "low end", but it's not taking a lot of power (... it's a laptop), and it's handling reasonably well whatever I was throwing at it (file server, Minecraft, random other things). Probably a lot better than running from an SD card.
@ssafar Sadly I don’t have and old laptop because the old laptop completely broke some years ago :(
@SonoMichele ... yeah, that considerably simplifies the choice of whether to use it or not :) given the rest of the thread, +1 vote to "pi 4" then :)
(... they might even be able to transcode in hardware maybe?)
@ssafar i don’t know, right now I’m looking online for hdd and how to use it on the rasp. I’m also looking for a case and maybe a fan(?)
Maybe the raspberry 4 is the best thing right now if it can handle Jellyfin and NextCloud. It’s cheap and small and as a first home server would be a nice thing to play with