I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
I wanted to echo this by saying that my lab stated as 4 bay Qnap NAS and evolved into repurposed consumer hardware as my interests and needs changed. My current server is an Optiplex that I bought for being small, quiet, and hanging lots of cores and my NAS is just my old gaming PC build with an HBA card (for extra SATA lanes) stuffed into a fancy case. A server is any computer that you say is a server (ideally one with functional network connectivity).