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?

  • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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    13 hours ago

    Absolutely yes. It’s better to use an old PC for a home server, because upgrades are cheaper, parts are easier to find, troubleshooting is generally easier, they’re usually more energy efficient than an older dedicated server, and you’re saving an old pc from becoming e-waste.

    That being said, what you want to run on it determines how old/cheap of a PC could work for you.

    Jellyfin works best when you can do hardware encoding, and these days that means throwing an ARC A310 in there and calling it a day. If you have a new enough processor, you don’t even need the graphics card.

    Mastodon is pretty disk heavy, but if you’ve got a nice hard disk to put the Minio server on and an SSD for the db, you’re golden. That’s how I run https://port87.social/. It’s running on an old 6th gen Intel i7. The PC I built in 2015 (with a few upgrades).

    CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up. I had to move my server off that same system I talked about above, because Minecraft was pegging the CPU a lot. But a 5 year old CPU would be fine for that. (Assuming that the 10 year old and 5 year old CPUs were both top tier CPUs when they were new. Like i7, i9, Ryzen 7, Ryzen 9. A five year old i3 would still struggle.)

    Basically unless you’re trying to run AI models on it, cheap hardware is fantastic for personal servers.

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      12 hours ago

      CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.

      Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        12 hours ago

        That’s really cool! I just run the vanilla server, but maybe I should check out Paper. Can it import worlds from vanilla?

        • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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          12 hours ago

          Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.

          Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.

          Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)

    • prenatal_confusion@feddit.org
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      12 hours ago

      Wondering if you have and insight on power usage with the a310 in the system while idling. I built a sub 25w server and don’t want to mess that up.

      • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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        12 hours ago

        Sorry, but I don’t know. I use an A380 in my system. I got it before the A310 was available.

          • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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            46 minutes ago

            I’d imagine not very much. I don’t know how to measure just the GPU. It doesn’t have any desktop installed, so it’s only ever rendering a console. It can transcode tons of 1080p streams at once, so even a transcode probably doesn’t draw much power. The CPU is the hungriest part, and that’s mostly idling too.