I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
Servers are just computers, you build what you are going to use it for. You can use a cheap N100 mini pc to host jellyfin as the important part there is the video encoder/decoder to transcode video. Though it can only do 2 streams at 4k with tone mapping. So it might not be good enough if you have more than 2 people using it or are running more stuff on it.