this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
39 points (95.3% liked)

Selfhosted

39893 readers
350 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I'm only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I'm not sure of the best bang for my buck. I'd like good, long-term performance, but I don't really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I'm thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bbbbb@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For $350-500 you could easily get a used desktop and processor with 16-32 gb ddr4. But it sort of depends on your home lab goals and workloads. Do you need a lot of storage? Are you CPU bound or memory bound? Some people will suggest used Dell/HP servers, and they’ll look affordable, but keep in mind enterprise gear will eat power and is usually loud. Personally I’d go for a used AMD 5800 or 5900 processor and mobo, install your favorite Linux, and call it a day. AMD processors don’t have quick sync which makes them slightly worse for plex hosting but better for everything else.

[–] DARbarian@artemis.camp 2 points 1 year ago

Not sure if I'm CPU-bound or RAM-bound, but I'd hazard to guess both lol And the lower the power consumption the better as this is an always-on, very passive deal.

[–] DARbarian@artemis.camp 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I only plan to run another dozen or so containers. What I want most is reliability/stability. I want everything I set up to, once it works, continue working without issue. This is where the Pi has begun frustrating me as it seems to just seize up sometimes. I do need as much storage as possible as I'm a bit of a media hoarder, but that can always be solved with more drives.

[–] bbbbb@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Makes sense. I think you’d be fine with pretty much any modern(post DDR4) motherboard/CPU combo these days. I feel Linux hardware support is only really shakey if you’re using a SoC without upstream patches or if you’re using brand new hardware/laptops. With that being said if you’re running a lot of containers on one host have you looked into docker compose or kubernetes(k8s)? Maybe k8s is overkill for home use, but both offer support to restart containers if a health check fails. With k8s you also can spread out containers across multiple physical node, so you could just add a second RPI and “double” your resources.

[–] Ninjasftw@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Also worth looking at k3s if its running on a single node to reduce resource usage