I’m trying to start out self-hosting and was looking for some good servers. I have a budget of ~100 USD and am in the US. I was initially going to get some type of raspberry pi but they seem to always be sold out here
I’d go with something like this Lenovo M900 for $80-$90 used. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and find one with a single 8GB stick, then you can get another for ~$20 and you’ve got a quad core x84-64 machine with 16GB of RAM for right around $100.
The downside would be power consumption compared to a Pi if you’re trying to fit in a severely power-constrained setup, but the M900 will draw around 11-13W idle and 55W under higher load. so it’s not bad my any means.
^ Lenovo tiny thinkcenters are the best thing ever. Heck, I use the older haswell-era M73s that you can get for $30-40 on ebay and they’re amazing. Only drawback is no m.2 and no PCIe expandability but if you’re on a budget and want a starter homelab you can literally cluster 3 of these things for ~$100
Try the Oracle Cloud free tier. It’s the best price you can get for a very beefy server: 4 arm64 cores with 24 GB RAM and 250 GB storage. Just don’t put too personal data on there.
Just wanted to add that you also get two free AMD64 servers (1C/1GB). Been using mine for a year now but I do agree - don’t use it for anything personal or critical. Make backups!
Yeah they are known to randomly pull them for no reason
I have an Intel NUC, particularly the NUC8i5BEH I got off eBay. Unofficially supports up to 64GB of memory and has NVMe and SATA for storage. Small footprint and sips power. I currently use mine to run ESXi with a few VMs on it, sits in a cupboard and had no issues with it. Probably a bit more expensive than a small form factor PCs from the likes of Dell or Lenovo for others have suggested though.
Do you know how much they are? Some family was showing me some. However, they were around 1.7K USD
I was watching one recently on eBay with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD that went for 200 GBP. I’d go secondhand, not brand new. Anything newer than an 8th gen intel CPU, ideally quad core should be enough to get you started.
Try second hand old computers? All my parts were sourced second hand. Whole thing including case was around $40, after some RAM and other upgrades and storage it’s about $150 altogether for dual core 16gb ram 3TB, 128gb ssd, GT710 for decoding, and a nice and quiet noctua CPU cooler.
People usually forget that home machines for server require:
- stable internet connection
- stable electricity supply
- hardware maintenance
- upgrade of hardware
I had all that when I was a student, it’s wonderful to learning opportunity. Now I grew up, I use VPS in cloud and pay for all that with ~16eur/month and could be even cheaper. But considering my work hour, I can pay for that amount with half an hour of work with my job.
While I totally agree that managing hardware at home can be cumbersome, if you need large and slow amounts of storage - e.g. for torrenting o plex - VPS are too expensive. With a ~250 € investment I could get a server with 2TB HD that consumes 50W at max while the same VPS would cost me twice - if not more - for 12 months.
Yes the immediate cost is lower, but when drive fails? You need to consider some RAID setup then so that means at least 2 of them. Well depends how much your data is worth…
Also consider that computers need external battery power for short power shortage and lightning protection. At least battery requires replacement every few years.
Check out Hetzner, you can get a very powerful dedicated server for under that budget.
Look for some refurbished thinclients or use a second-hand laptop. If needed upgrade it with a SSD.
That depends on what you’re wanting to do with it. If you’re just playing around rn I’d almost recommend seeing if you can get an older desktop and mess around with virtualization/containers that way.
Advantage: a desktop machine is gonna be more expandable than a single board computer and easier to migrate when you have the money for something with more power.
My first server was a Lenovo Thinkpad T420. It was given to me for free from my job. It did great. Built in screen, mouse/keyboard, and a built in UPS. Eventually I upgraded my server, and my new one has none of those.
I second what others are saying about finding some used mini PCs. My lab consists of server hardware mainly doing storage stuff plus some mini PCs for most services.
You might get something slightly better on the used market. But, if you’re not looking to run anything resource intensive, check for Beelink mini PCs on Amazon. They have some on sale right now that hit your price range.
I have a stack of lenovo m93s & M900s from when our hospital was bought out by a larger one. Installed opensuse on a couple to act as web/app servers for dinking around with.
My storage server is an old Ryzen desktop someone was going to recycle with a bunch (24TB) of extra drives added. Opensuse as well.
I usually just do bare metal because that is how I was taught back in the day, and since they’re only accessible internally it doesn’t make much of a difference security wise.
I like the kimsufi offerings by OVH. You can order most servers either in France or on Canada.
Problem, I am currently living in the US
You can order a Canadian server with fairly low latency. I have one but I also have a couple of machines at home. I don’t like buying used and I care about wattage so I usually get beelinks mini PC from Amazon. They often have deals where you can have good specs for <$150, including 128gb SSDs, 8 or 16gb of ram and a 4 cores 15w CPU
