Hey yall, I want to get into self-hosting. I want to start from hosting on a raspberry pi, and I am just wondering if yall have any recommendations (I’ve never hosted anything before, but have experience in linux and programming). Sorry if it’s bit of a stupid question.
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Pihole is the best starting point in my opinion, helped a lot of my friend to get started !
as tempting as pihole is. The last time I tried to do that. the pi went offline causing no internet when i was asleep (i’m a night owl) so my dad got mad at me for changing the dns settings on the router. So now I just have the router set to quad9 (used to have it set to cloudflare’s 1.1.1.2, but recently changed it)
Goes against the spirit of self-hosting but for some stuff(Email, DNS, Passwords), I just SaaS it out. As much as I love my lab, nothing self-hosted in my prod environment is critical.
Pihole is a good start, though I personally use my Pi 3B+ for printer server over WiFi since I have a dumb Epson printer.
Pihole is easy and light enough. I used to host Transmission (transmission-daemon) on a 3B+ and it worked alright for seeding around 300-500 torrents. FreshRSS also worked alongside.
For the cost of a rpi, just get actually capable hardware. Once you actually get anything running you’ll wish you had real hardware.
I’ve been leaning this way lately. From a cost/capability standpoint, RPis were easy to justify when they were ~$30, but not as much at their current inflated prices unless you have specific power consumption and form factor requirements. Used/refurbished Dell thin clients and MFF PCs can be had for $40-100, ranging from fanless systems with low-power Atoms and Celerons to full-fledged desktops with Core i-series CPUs, all with memory and storage included more often than not. I personally just picked up a Dell OptiPlex MFF with an i5-9500T, 8GB RAM, and 256GB SSD for $100.
What kind of hardware, with a similar price point to the rpi, do you think of?
This reminds me of the old “build a gaming pc for less than a console” thing was popular for a while.
So let’s assume a $90 raspberry pi (someone really splurged here)
- $90: case
- $0: cpu, get used from a friend
- $0: motherboard, get used from a friend
- $0: ram, get used from a friend
- $0: power supply, steal from work
You can drop the case and just use a cardboard box, which would allow you to afford storage. I’m just going to assume you boot from a usb and keep everything in memory.
What do you think about refurbished micro-pc’s? Like this Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny (i5-6500t; 8GB RAM) for 130 euro’s?
I have a refurbished dell that I got for ~$150-$200, the cpu is an i5-8500t. I think those are great deals, would absolutely recommend them for a home server. As your needs grow, you can even replace the RAM inside later.
Agreed. I picked up the M910q for $100 including shipping from a corporate sell out on Ebay. It does everything I need; and has the ability to do so much more.
One suggestion might be to load a Debian build on it and use it for docker containers. With docker containers you can do so many different things. I have a PI 4 and it does all of the following:
PiHole - For blocking ads. (Everyone should have one of these)
OpenMediaVault - For NAS
Portainers - For loading docker containers
Radarr - Downloading Movies
Sonarr - Downloading TV Shows
Tautulli - Monitors my plex server
Overseer - Allows members of my plex share to request content.
NZBGET and Real-Debrid Torrent Downloader Clients - For downloading content from usenet or real-debrid.I have one Pi4 running all of these as docker containers. Have fun!
