Selfhosted
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.
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Sounds like you're trying to run a decent little homelab, so I would personally recommend going with prosumer hardware. Lots of N95, N100, and N5105 routers available on AliExpress, you should be able to flash OpenWRT, OPNSense, PFSense, whatever you want. I would advise getting one with an i225 or i226 NIC for best software compatibility (support for Realtek NICs can be sketchy).
I waited for a sale and got this one (N5105 version) for $95: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804915099903.html
I got the barebones version, then supplied my own Crucial RAM and a cheap hard drive for under $50. It runs PFSense without even breaking a sweat, and supports 2.5Gbps. There are cheaper options too, but I decided to stick with Topton as it's a brand that's well-reviewed by Youtubers that I watch.
After that, all you need is a Wifi access point. You probably can use your old router in AP mode for now, and then consider upgrading to a newer one later. I bought a Unifi U6 Pro AP and now my home network is incredibly overprovisioned for my puny little homelab, all for about $300. Lots of room to grow if I want to.
These are definitely the way to go, plenty of fanless mini pcs with at least 2 NICs aimed squarely at this use case.
And even the little n100 chip is more than most normal people need for a router, even with an encrypted VPN or deep packet inspection, so you can virtualise and run some light services alongside the router OS, like jellyfin, a caching service, or something like Grafana
Yeah an N100 is overkill, unless you want to use Proxmox to virtualize multiple things. I got an N5105, which is significantly slower, and even THAT is kinda overkill for just running PFSense in a SOHO environment like I'm doing.