Unraid FTW.
See, I don’t pay for the electric bill to keep my collection of old enterprise equipment running because I need the performance. I keep them running because I have no resistance to the power of blinkenlights.
I had to buy a lenovo thinkcentre mini because was cheaper than a brandnew raspberry pi.
This struggle usually takes place over a weekend.
This guy selfhosts
I still like vms on digital ocean. I guess I’m a seething soydev.
I use a DO droplet with docker compose. Filthy dev here too. Much cheaper overtime than buying and hosting home server equipment.
Some stuff you want to have in your house though, like storage and stuff like home assistant.
I’d never trust DO with my vintage europorn collection
Or you learn proxmox and running everything as a VM
i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
Reduces electric waste
A lot of older equipment actually wastes more electricity.
But it will cut down on electronic waste.
not always. especially laptops
not always a lot of
Not necessarily.
A i5-6500 has a TDP of 65W while a i5-13600K has a TDP of 150W.
If you get something modern that has the performance of a i5-6500 it will be a little bit more efficient. The key is that more performance uses more power.
13600K
If you buy a high watt CPU, that’s on you. Ryzen 7 also came out in 2022 and had many 65 watt cpus that could outperform an i5-6500.
not necessarily
a lot of
Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
my 19 year old laptop runs the web server just fine, and only needs 450 mb ram even with many security modules. it produces minimal noise
Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
I have a Lenovo M710q with a i3 7100T that uses 3W at idle. I’m not mining bitcoin, server is idle 23h a day if not more.
Think centre tiny here
Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
lenovo thinkcentre m910q supremacy
Yesss I have a m910q as my main with (IIRC) a 6500T 4 cores.
And a m710 with the CD contraption for backup (the CD is just for fun, the PC is the backup) :-p
Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
Same mentality but HP Elitedesk Minis
Just add dell micro to the list and you have what I run - 9 tiny/mini/micro PCs run everything here. Though I may move a few things to a VPS soon.
Edit:
- (4) Dell Micros
- (3) Lenovo Tinys
- (2) HP Minis
How would you class them, if you think you could/would/should? I’m so impressed with the thinkcentre tiny I wonder if it can get better at all.
Mostly equitable.
Ive had a slightly higher failure rate with the Dells, but the sample size is too small to be relevant.
The Lenovos more often than others ive found outfitted with a dGPU which comes in handy in some scenarios, but I think that comes down more on which enterprises more often purchase Lenovos and want the dGPU, and that its just what ive come across in the used/decommissioned territory.
Short answer - they are basically all the same.
ServeTheHome has a series “tiny mini micro” for exactly this reason.
Yeah what I’ve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.
I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware that’s only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. It’s a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. It’s obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.
I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don’t care that it’s just for wife’s home-made dog collars webshop.
This is the way
You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
Imagine, if you will, a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis!
A man of culture, I see!
I don’t get this; a Pi isn’t even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn’t stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
That’s if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
I have an old rackmount server I got for free. Dual Xeon X5650s, 192GB of RAM, four 8TB HDDs, and a pair of 250GB SSDs. I can only use it in the basement because it’s too loud to run anywhere else, but even then, it’s currently off because it trips its circuit breaker under heavy load.
A power strip full of Pis in a k3s cluster doesn’t do that. I used a 2GB model 4 for the control plane and 3Bs as the workers.
The problem is that server will probably use more electricity, it’ll be clunky to store, and it’s going to be loud as fuck.
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A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.
Yeah, a mini PC… or if you already have one, why not 5 mini PCs?
That’s what Iam aiming for at the next hardware update. I don’t have the space for a server rack and a SFF desktop would also not fit into my home, so a miniPC it’ll be. I cannot wait to move to x86.
I’m not sure if I’m alone in this but I have a terrible aversion to transcoding. I know the loss of quality is probably not that huge (depending on the original codec) but I just can’t bring myself to get past it.
As a result I have a tiny arm based box with a 2tb SSD and I’m happy out.
You want to avoid it everywhere possible of course.
But when the GF tries to use Jellyfin on whatever random device that doesn’t have the codec support to play it, it is nice to have.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense in fairness.
Trash.guides can help ya setup profiles so it won’t ever transcode unless the the above reason happens
I need
It’s just fun to play with, there is no “need”.
Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don’t really want nor need that 😄
Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn’t handle.
I’m rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.
I’ve always liked riscv. Just the idea of literally everything on the device being open source is a fun idea. Manuals to everything.
Just because the ISA is open source doesn’t mean that the end product or even the design will be open source.
RISC-V is licensed permissively, giving anyone the right to make a proprietary (or FOSS) RISC-V processor.
Often times, you’ll see mostly open source cores, but then some extention is proprietary.
Waiting for proxmox-arm becoming a thing (I know there’s some community versions trying it but I’m not sure how reliable they are)
The hardware virtualisation available for arm just isn’t there yet
Apple Silicon Macs do a great job with virtualization. Outside of them there’s just no nice high end hardware that’s well suited for something like proxmox. It’s either low end SBC, or the hyper proprietary ARM servers that I don’t think we can even buy.
Modern Android phones include a hw-accelerated hypervisor. In Android 16, there will be a feature to run a full Linux VM through what Google calls protected Kernel VM (pKVM).
Qualcomm has their own implementation called Gunyah
Those are heavily customised, we’re talking raspberry pi’s here
Is there RISC-V hardware already? I thought the specification was still under development.
Very much so, not quite ready for prime time maybe, but you can play with it, StarFive is quite well-known for their chips in this space for example
Ok great! Time to get me some presents.
There are some Raspi competitors offering SBCs with RISC-V chips, there is even a RISC-V Mainboard for the framework laptops, but the last time I checked they sadly didn’t reach the performance levels of comparable ARM chips.
Psh if I’m writing at that level I don’t need the performance yet. Thanks!
I bought a decade old Z840 and it’s great for VMs, Plex, Arr stack, and a few other services but it is so overkill with 2 GPUs. I think what I should’ve done was buy a couple of used desktops or laptops to expand the my homelab as I needed.
Wait, you can host a website on a raspberry pi !? But is it really cheaper than shared hosting, for instance? And even then, quality-wise, it cannot be that good, can it?
You can host a website on a lot less, even. But it entirely depends on what you’re hosting and the load. Basically anything can host a bunch of static pages, so if your site is just that, basically anything will do. You could probably even do a WordPress site with the right caching plugins and serve a reasonable amount of traffic. The first limit you’ll hit realistically is your uplink, not your webserver CPU.
Same as a 4x CPU with 8GB ram VPS.
Unless bandwidth is a limiting factor.
But the quality of a website is about code. Not about hardwareYou see, bits sent from an x86 have 10% more antioxidants…
I had a website serve me oxidised bits. My computer BSODd and now I have herpes.
Need those antioxidants
You can definitely run a low traffic website with a Pi. You can run Minecraft Servers and such on Pis. Especially on Pi4s.
My understanding is raspberrypi.com is hosted on raspberry pis. It’s a Linux computer; it can do anything a Linux computer can do.
I’ve discovered that there are a lot of medium-tier software engineers who immediately will go straight to horizontal scaling (i.e: just throw hardware at it), and I’ve seen instances where very highly skilled engineers just write their code better, set things up on a bare metal server, cache things, etc. and manage with just a single badass server
Even just the choice of programming language makes a big difference. Running a JVM language or NodeJS, Python, Ruby etc., you can be bottlenecked by a Pi. Meanwhile, Rust or C/C++ will use barely a fraction of those resources.
Right? I just spin up another process on my home server. No need to get more hardware involved for something that’s inherently a software problem.
