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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All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.
Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it's a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection
My i5 6600k will turn 10 years old this year. I'm fortunate because upgrading to 32 GB should keep it running for a while still.
My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I'm not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.
My home Kubernetes cluster started out on a Core i7-920 with 8 GB of memory.
Upgraded to 16 GB memory
Upgraded to a Core i5-2400S
Upgraded to a Core i7-3770
Upgraded to 32 GB memory
Recently Upgraded to a Core i5-7600K
I think I'll stay with that for rather long...
I did however add 2 Intel NUCs (gen 6 and gen 8) to the cluster to have a distributed control plane and some distributed storage.
Oldest I got is limited to 16GB (excluding rPis). My main desktop is limited to 32GB which is annoying, because I sometimes need more. But, I have a home server with 128GB of RAM that I can use when it's not doing other stuff. I once needed more than 128GB of RAM (to run optimizations on a large ONNX model, iirc), so had to spin up an EC2 instance with 512GB of RAM.
Wow, it's been a long time since I had hardware that awful.
My old NAS was a Phenom II x4 from 2009, and I only retired it a year and a half ago when I upgraded my PC. But I put 8GB RAM into that since it was a 64-bit processor (could've put up to 32GB I think, since it had 4 DDR3 slots). My NAS currently runs a Ryzen 1700, but I still have that old Phenom in the closet in case that Ryzen dies, but I prefer the newer HW because it's lower power.
That said, I once built a web server on an Arduino which also supported websockets (max 4 connections). That was more of a POC than anything though.
I used to self host some stuff on an old 2011 iMac. Worked fine, actually
I'm hosting a minio cluster on my brother-in-law's old gaming computer he spent $5k on in 2012 and 3 five year old mini-pcs with 1tb external drives plugged into them. Works fine.
My first @home server was an old defective iMac G3 but it did the job (and then died for good) A while back, I got a RP3 and then a small thin client with some small AMD CPU. They (barely) got the job done.
I replaced them with an HP EliteDesk G2 micro with a i5-6500T. I don't know what to do with the extra power.
Plex server is running on my old Threadripper 1950X. Thing has been a champ. Due to rebuild it since I've got newer hardware to cycle into it but been dragging my heels on it. Not looking forward to it.
Isn't ryzen not recommended for transcoding? Plus, I've read that power efficiency isn't great. Mostly regarding idle power consumption.
Ryzen is not recommended for transcoding because the Radeon integrated GPU's encoding accelerator is not as fast as in intel iGPUs. But this does not come into play if you A) have 16 cores and B) don't even have an integrated GPU.
And about idle power consumption: I don't think it's a point of interest if you are using a workstation class computer.
I think it's a point of a interest for any hw running 24/7 but you do you.
Regarding transcoding, are you saying you're not even doing it? If you are, doing it with your cpu is far more inefficient than using a gpu. But again, different strokes I guess.
Dunno whether they are transcoding or not nor why they have such a bizarre setup. But I would hope 16C/32T CPU from 2017 could handle software transcoding. Also peak power consumption while playing a movie does not really matter compared to idle power consumption. What matters more is that the motherboard is probably packed with pcie slots that consume a lot of power. But to OP it probably does not matter if they use a threadripper.
I would hope 16C/32T CPU from 2017 could handle software transcoding
I didn't say it couldn't handle it. Just that it was very inefficient.
peak power consumption while playing a movie does not really matter compared to idle power consumption
I mentioned both things. Did you actually read my comments?
I'm still interested in Self-Hosting but I actually tried getting into self-hosting a year or so ago. I bought a s***** desktop computer from Walmart, and installed window server 2020 on it to try to practice on that.
Thought I could use it to put some bullet points on my resume, and maybe get into self hosting later with next cloud. I ended up not fully following through because I felt like I needed to first buy new editions of the server administration and network infrastructure textbooks I had learned from a decade prior, before I could continue with giving it an FQDN, setting it up as a primary DNS Server, or pointing it at one, and etc.
So it was only accessible on my LAN, because I was afraid of making it a remotely accessible server unless I knew I had good firewall rules, and had set up the primary DNS server correctly, and ultimately just never finished setting it up. The most ever accomplished was getting it working as a file server for personal storage, and creating local accounts with usernames and passwords for both myself and my mom, whom I was living with at the time. It could authenticate remote access through our local Wi-Fi, but I never got further.
I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.
I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.
It's not new, but it's not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.
The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn't actually require that much compute power. Thus, it's a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it's idle most of the time so it doesn't use much power anyway.