I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
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Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.
This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.
Definitely a NUC or similar mini PC from the likes of Geekom, Beelink, or Minisforum. My whole homelab was mini PCs until I consolidated to a NUC 12 Pro as I build up my rack. Slap Proxmox on the machine, build some VMs and LXCs, and have at it.
At the moment hardware is just expensive. I ended up with a NUC with 32gb of ram in order to future proof myself while I wait for hardware to become cheaper. Other than another stick of ram I can’t see me needing to update any time soon.
I just built a Server using J5040 board. With 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system , 2x4tb ironwolf, all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.
Will run proxmox as first layer.
I use a Dell Micro with Ubuntu for docker containers mounted to a wall with a Synology NAS 4 bay for storage. I used to have a small form factor with a 12bay SAS array attached but the power consumption was ridiculous.
One of those business Thin Clients for ~150$. They are pretty much a full fledged PC that run everything you throw at it, but tiny. The only problem with mine is that the fan is a bit loud on idle.
Im using refurbished thinkpads (x220-203) but i’ve seen a lot of homelabs using Nuc pc
I have some (refurbished) HP mini PCs that are pretty decent, you can probably find similar things well within that range. You could also consider an off-lease/used server in that price range, but will have to do some hunting to find something you like. Also, servers can be a bit loud and power hungry (the efficiency of the compute is lower than e.g. a mini PC or a Pi, but it will have way more compute. Servers with something like dual hex core CPUs and 64+ GB of RAM are not uncommon).
I run both mini PCs and server hardware, using the server hardware mainly for storage or services that need quite high availability (auth, reverse proxy, password vault) and the mini PCs for most everything else (minecraft servers, wiki, jellyfin, etc)
HP EliteDesk 800 G3 go for about 110€ on eBay in my area so they should have similar pricing in the US. Bought three of them and upgraded each one to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of NVME storage. They’re near silent and draw very little power which is perfect for me. I’ve set them up as a Proxmox cluster to host a bunch of VMs for messing around. I wouldn’t recommend them for applications that do video encoding though. Plex for example can bring one of these machines to its knees when you’re dealing with very large 4K Blu-ray rips like I am. In that case I usually just run Plex on my desktop when I need to.
Do you have the Mini one or the regular one? Because the fan in my Mini is kinda annoying even on low speeds. Now I wonder if it’s normal or if it’s broken somehow.
