Hello, I’ve been saying it to myself for a year now, but I’m on summer break rn and I really need to do something with my life. Here’s some of the software I plan to host. Goal is to not spend more than $150-200, I do have some gift cards though.
Absolutely Will Run:
Nextcloud & Immich - I want to replace Google and OneDrive
Might do in the near future:
Jellyfin - my mom and I usually just bootleg by using Kodi on our FireTV, so not a major need rn, but might be nice for future purposes.
piHole - better overall ad blocking, so I don’t have to use nextDNS on all my devices, and maybe help my mom out.
VPN - I currently pay for Proton, and we use it on the FireTV, but it sucks cause it doesn’t have killswitch. I have several devices and profiles that I use, so I was thinking maybe just an overall VPN might be nice
Seeding - I think it would be nice to give back to the community, since I torrent every now and then.
OS Plan: I plan to use Proxmox as I have a little bit of experience using it, and others seem to like it a lot for managing multiple software.
I know I don’t need to go full power mode rn, so I wanna stick with something low end that I could maybe upgrade in the future. Should I just buy a used laptop/PC, or get like an Optiplex or ThinkServer? I don’t wanna rack up my parent’s electric bill. I already got some hard drives a year ago, so but is using an external drive bad?
I know to use the Ethernet ports so my signal isn’t shit, but I gotta work out the best spot I can put my server. I do know an okay amount of networking knowledge, and I’m a cyber student anyway so this is like a fun yet educational personal project for me.
When it comes to external access and security of these services, should I stick with Tailscale? Some people have concerns over the proprietary bits and are using headscale instead I guess.
Any guidance is much appreciated!
IMO, you want ram more than you want processing power. 16 gig ought to be enough. Most of the time your containers will sit dormant and just consume memory. However since you want to run Jellyfin, get a recent CPU which can do hardware decoding of popular codecs. There’s charts online that show what generation can handle what codecs. Ideally you don’t want that done by software. You should still be able to find something cheap.
In terms of placement. It depends a lot on noise IMO. If you’re running something small without magnetic storage, you’re probably fine to stick it anywhere. If you have several data-centre grade hard drives, you will probably want to keep it somewhere where you wont hear it all day.
In terms of upgrading, I’m not sure if its as much of a concern as you might think. I run probably about 30 docker containers off a NUC clone and a seperate NAS, and that has worked pretty well for the last few years. I can always add more drives to the NAS, but otherwise its fine. Also, many of my services scale to zero with sablier+traefik, and I schedule filesharing for low bandwidth times. This makes things pretty manageable.