I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that’s off the table. I’ll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
Take what you have, start small and learn from it.
Old laptops are great, because they have low power consumption and even pretty used up battery will give you power redundancy.
Even a 10yo laptop is something with 4-5th gen Core cpu and that has plenty of power to get you started.
This specifically depends on what you want to run.
I’d say grab any unused PC in your home or off the street and it’ll work. Raspberry Pi are good for low wattage so it’s not expensive to run 24/7/365.
The electricity savings would pay for itself over time vs a 10 year old random desktop.
The one you already have.
Basically none. Grab whatever device you have on hand and install Docker on it.
Find out if there are any corporate off-lease machines being sold in your area. USFF machines are frequently used as mini desktops or point of sale computers then sold off for peanuts when warranties are done. Especially look at i3-8xxx generation, as they don’t support windows 11 fully.
Any corporate fleet machines, really. Corporate C-suite executives always demand the best laptops on the market… They also demand the newest laptops on the market. Because they can’t be seen with a worse laptop than the graphic artists or the programmers. This means there’s always fresh stock of last year’s corporate laptop hitting the used market. And they’re almost always gently used, because they just sat docked on some executive’s desk for a year, and were only used to answer emails.
Those $2000 laptops often get dropped on eBay for like $250, because the random Accounting person who has to auction them off doesn’t really care how much they sell for; They’re just checking a “was sold to recoup costs” checkbox.
One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.
I’m running an old Igel M340C thin client to run a lot of stuff, from Jellyfin to AdguardHome. Perfectly enough.
I highly recommend you try proxmox to get the most potential out of you system. Basically can run many services and vm with little overhead, dynamically sharing the specs.
Now about those specs… what everybody else said really but heres some pointers:
You don’t need a big dedicated gpu unless your doing something that explicitly demands it. They are tricky to setup with virtual machines also.
If you plan on running a minecraft server i recommend at least 8gb ram. Most will probably run fine on 4. You can probably run quite a few things on 8gb but ram is cheap and its nice to have some extra room.
For cpu, the more things you do the More sense it makes to have more cores. If you plan on buying then amd ryzen x y z is you best option where.
X is the number you want higher Y is a number you should not care about as much Z is potentialy the letter “G” for graphics, they are often more expensive. Get them anyway because now you dont need a dedicated gpu (and even if you already own a gpu. Trust me you will thank me if that one ever has issues)
If you really want me to draw you something decent up that will give you plenty of freedom to experiment.
Ryzen 7 … G, 32gb ram. Small ssd for os. xTB of performence HDD ideally configured as some raid in proxmox.
It still cannot be said often enough that a (well cared for) second hand unlabeled laptop running ubuntu is all what most people need when they start pondering about home servers.
The one you already have and/or if a raspberry pi 2 (all) can do it…. So can you. It’s not a game, you don’t need a RTX 9090Ti Super Omega Beta Pizza to run it.
Go wuth what you have. Old laptop? Works! Old desktop? Also works! Old android phone? Might work! (VM/terminal)
If you have a device that can run Linux, start with that. Once you get some usage you can understand if you need an upgrade, and what kind. Maybe you will findout that this old laptop that you had works perfectly and you can sace money on buying a server.
As everyone have said, it depends on what you want to have in your server. I started with an old lenovo I bought in mercado livre for 200 BRL. It was a DDR2 PC with 4Gb ram. I bought an ssd and installed Debian. Used for years. After that I tried to build a DDR3 PC. Made it with 800 BRL and it’s decent to run my docker containers like an arr stack, nextcloud, VPN, reverse proxy and vaultwarden.
Depends on what you want the server to do. A Minecraft server and a Pihole server have vastly different requirements. As a general rule, any old laptop or desktop will do, think on requirements for your grandma and that should cover most (except gaming servers) needs.
If the size and low power consumption of the Pi are what appeal to you, you can try a getting a used thin client. Lots of suggestions and specs here: http://parkytowers.me.uk/
The joke is electricity and Linux.
The real answer is the free hardware.
My main reliable is from 2008? It cannot do modern virtualization due to not having the CPU instruction sets.
You might check if a simple CPU upgrade would get you there. I previously ran some 2005 Poweredge servers that came with a Pentium D processor, and it cost me something like $8 from ebay to upgrade to a Xeon and start running KVM.
I use a random micro PC with Ubuntu installed. 2tb nvme, 16gb ram, not even sure what the cpu is
A computer. Seriously that’s it. Of course depends on your use case (media servers usually need more than a web host for example)
My current server is just my previous desktop PC hardware. $0 when you repurpose while upgrading your desktop.
