I don‘t know if this is the right place to ask, but is this an OK build for a first start in selfhosting? Is there anything obvious I could improve? I‘d mainly run Nextcloud, Immich, some Docker containers and smaller web applications and cronjobs.
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17 daysDepends on the docker containers but it’s way overkill than you might think.
Since you’re starting it may be worth looking into used office PCs like the thinkcentre from Lenovo or other brands(no tiny or ssf since they don’t have to room for drives). They often offer good perfomance for the price and the power consumption is not too high.
I run a lot of containers in my homelab, which consists of an OrangePi (similar to an RaspberryPi 5). It works surprisingly well, and was only (at the time) $250 for the board, case, and emmc drive.
- 16 days
Not for me. I have a very quick ryzen setup with tons of ram and nvme etc. I never want back to a orange pi. But sure. I don’t like waiting, as a developer myself I just want to have quick loading pages and services.
Most of these devices have very limited IO disks speeds as well as slow processors. And also limited ram.
- realbadat@programming.devEnglish17 days
Just about anything is OK for a server, I use whatever hardware I get from work thats being decommissioned.
The biggest limit I see is the ram. Depending on what you spin up and how, it’ll be the tightest budget per service.
- sepi@piefed.socialEnglish17 days
I have used a laptop without a screen as a server, raspberry pis, 10 year old laptop, proliant server, something with a via itx motherboard and a cheap cpu, like literal trash.
So yeah your build is more than fine. Don’t stress your budget too much, but if you can afford this you will have better than my first “server”. Remember to have fun with it! Your server looks fabulous, and I’m not discouraging you from pursuing it in the least. However, if I may draw from my own personal experience and what I am currently running, it may give you some ideas. Currently, I am running 53 containers on a Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and 32 GB RAM. Just checked and it’s load average at this moment is: 0.47, 0.60, 0.73. Meaning it’s pretty much in an idle state except for logging in just now. Grand total cost was less than $200. It consumes about $8 USD/month.
Unless you’re going to get into selfhosting heavy AI models, most stock PC, office discards, etc built in the last 10 years will do just fine for a homelab, with a little love like some additional RAM or a dual nic card. Immich and Nextcloud will probably require a bit more than 16 GB RAM running together. I don’t run Immich, but I do run Nextcloud and it does just fine with the above set up. No lags, stutters, etc.
- FippleStone@aussie.zoneEnglish16 days
How much do to pay for electricity? I’m running an I5-3470 and it costs about $17.50 USD/month, at $0.23 per kwh, the stack of 3.5" HDD’s pushes up the power consumption a fair bit though
- 17 days
Your part list is extremely similar to my main home server. You’ll do just fine with the hardware you’ve selected. It is a GREAT starting point.
For context I have been running an AMD 5600g alongside 32gb gskill ddr4 RAM since covid, tho back then it was a 2600x paired with an ancient FirePro for graphics. Boot drive is m.2 ssd and I have 4 hand-me-down enterprise HDDs for storage. (I originally was using whatever spinning rust I already had on-hand at that time, but I have replaced them since)
- waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish17 days
If you’re already going for spinning rust hard disks, why limit yourself to the 3 TB ones? IMHO, these days, spinning rust only makes sense at 8 TB+ per disk.
FYI: I’m a noob myself.
Looks fine, but if you’re looking to mess around with a first build then you could go cheaper. Secondhand hardware would save you money, especially since older hardware is great for server use. At least you’re saving money with AM4 and DDR4.
Some thoughts:
- I went with an Intel CPU for Jellyfin transcoding.
- 16gb ram is enough to start and I host tons of stuff with that much, but the more ram the better. Having 2 more ram slots for future expansion would serve you well (but not essential).
- Faster networking would be better. Your mobo has 1 gigabit LAN. Again not a deal breaker. You can add faster networking yourself later.
This guy makes great videos, but you have to be careful to not overcomplicate things or chase specs that pro home server guys want that make no difference to noobs.
Note about the network: it really doesn’t matter how fast your server can go if the rest of the stuff connected to it can’t also handle it.
You have a server with a 10 gigabit network port, you also need the cabling, router, switches, and other hardware that can handle 10 gigabit.
- 16 days
Might be abit much but double your ram if you intend on using a lot of apps
- 16 days
I agree. The most limiting factor is still memory for me. And I’m max out currently of my motherboard (128gb).
Recently thessecond limiting factor is actually cpu. But that is due to my gitlab runners.
- hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish15 days
how are you using 128 GB? Genuinely curious because I run over 20 services with only 8 GB
- 14 days
- I run 50+ websites
- MariaDB instances
- PostgreSQL instances
- Docker containers
- Mbin, Nextcloud, GitLab, GitLab runners, gitea, bitcoind, fulcrum, grafana, prometheus, influxdb, Synapse, Angie, telegraf and various other services like fail2ban etc. etc.
All optimized for performance and fine tuned as well, eg. lets say you run mariadb vs how I run it:
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 8G innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2 innodb_log_file_size = 2G innodb_log_buffer_size = 32M innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct = 90 innodb_io_capacity=5000 innodb_io_capacity_max=20000 innodb_read_io_threads=8 innodb_write_io_threads=8 query_cache_type = 1 query_cache_limit = 2M query_cache_min_res_unit = 2k query_cache_size = 128M tmp_table_size= 128M max_heap_table_size= 128M [mysqld] max_connections = 200 character_set_server = utf8mb4 collation_server = utf8mb4_general_ci transaction_isolation = READ-COMMITTED binlog_format = ROW innodb_file_per_table=1 # Increase open files based limits.conf value open_files_limit=65535Same idea for Postgresql… You can run “postgres” or… actually run postgresql in production correctly like:
shared_buffers = 6GB work_mem = 20MB maintenance_work_mem = 2GB maintenance_io_concurrency = 200 max_worker_processes = 14 max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 4 max_parallel_maintenance_workers = 4 max_parallel_workers = 12 synchronous_commit = off commit_delay = 300 checkpoint_timeout = 30min max_wal_size = 60GB min_wal_size = 4GB- hirihit640@sh.itjust.worksEnglish13 days
Actually now that I check your username I think I have seen your instances before, though it seems like your website is down at the moment. But thank you for service to open source !
- 13 days
I block some misbehaving data centers. Which are often also used by VPN providers. So it’s more collateral damage.
No I fully block some data centers not just rate limit.
Massive overkill!
That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:
- A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! https://a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
- A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that’s made for that kind of thing (they’re all terrible keyboards—it’s only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.
Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!
I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.
- 16 days
I don’t think it’s a massive overkill. He most likely will try to host even some more services besides nextcloud etc.
I recommend actually to get more ram. Despite the stupid high prices I know.
I would probably go Intel with iGPU for the transcoding and acceleration for Immich. i3-14100 is fast and cheap.
Otherwise you definitely have far more CPU power than you’ll need for those apps so no worries there.
- yaroto98@lemmy.worldEnglish17 days
One thing you may want to explore is your OS. If you want to do what you suggested with a NAS OS like TrueNAS or Unraid. They can take advantage of a ssd cache. One small regular ssd for your OS, storage on your hdd array, and a NAS quality ssd that essentially runs your docker containers that gets backed up to your array.
It’s not nessesary. But if it’s something you think you might want to do in the future, you’ll want a plan for it now. Make sure you have enough mobo connections, and space in your case or an idea on how you would want to expand.
- sarkxy@lemmy.worldEnglish17 days
Yes it will be fine. Much will depend on what OS you will run and in turn how you want to do storage. NAS drives might not be necessary if you going to use software defined storage. If in your budget consider a CPU with more cores for virtualization and docker.
Overall nothing wrong with that configuration. But if you really get into all the awesome stuff you can self host your two constraints are RAM and CPU cores.
- libewa@feddit.orgEnglish17 days
The NAS drives are here because they are from an old NAS which only uses a cheap dual-core Intel, has 2G of RAM, and boots from eMMC. So anything would be an upgrade…
- 17 days
16GB RAM may be a bit low for the setup, as others have suggested, but I’m currently running Immich and Nextcloud and a handful of other small services (like FMD) dockerized in an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve experienced very few issues. In my opinion, you could find a used Ryzen 3600 or even older, and 16GB will probably serve you just fine. You could save yourself a hundred bucks or more.
That said, what you’ve got here is nice and future-proof for quite a while, even if you end up going down the rabbit hole. You might eventually need another 16GB of RAM, but maybe not until after the AI bubble pops 🙂
- 11 days
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PSU Power Supply Unit SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity nginx Popular HTTP server
[Thread #71 for this comm, first seen 2nd Aug 2026, 22:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- libewa@feddit.orgEnglish17 days
Follow up question: Do I need a separate CPU cooler, or is the boxed Wraith enough? And how loud is it? I can’t really find info on that.
- 17 days
Wraith is fine. I have mine installed and it’s dead quiet. If you don’t like the noise, you can always get a 15-25$ USD aftermarket cooler, brands like ThermalRight and Cooler Master come to mind.
- waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish17 days
So long as you’re using the spinning rust hdds, the noise of the CPU cooler won’t make much difference. Mind you, this PC will be a bit too loud for the living room like this.
