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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If you're only running nextcloud on it, any computer 15 years old or newer, with at least 4GB ram will be able to handle it.
If you want to have a reliable installation, avoid a raspberry pi and get a computer that can take at least two storage drives so that you can set up RAID. Or better yet, mount the storage from a dedicated NAS.
Most computers should be able to run Nextcloud, but to double-check, look at the minimum requirements for Nextcloud. I run my instance using an old laptop I had lying around, and I think it has an 11th gen Intel processor of some kind and 8GB of RAM. It runs fine with plenty of headroom for many other services
I run nextcloud and a few other things comfortably on a pi 5 Not sure how much ram it has I think maybe 4?
Some HP SFF with 8GB+ and maybe 6th gen or higher would suffice. Spend $100 on a used one which will come with a small SSD. Slap a used 4TB drive in it for storage. Install Debian, Docker and use the NC AIO config.
Don't piss around with a Pi that's going to be twice the price with a tiny SD card (that you shouldn't use for volatile storage), no NVME or SATA, and a tenth of the processing power.
I highly recommend factoring in a cheap UPS into the project.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
[Thread #298 for this comm, first seen 16th May 2026, 19:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
more details about use case plz. how much storage do you think you need, how many users, how many concurrent users, is this a node or the entire server, is this the sole exclusive use case, do you not want to add more services later, etc
And what's your electricity cost per kWh.
Payback time of a Pi 5 vs an old laptop could be well under 2 years depending on where you live
@DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world recommended this on is the last similar thread to this one: Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro. The price seems right and you could probably run good many other Docker containers in the future.
My comment got deleted for some reason
I think the mods deleted under rule 3 which really doesn't make much sense to me. If you are going to self host and you are starting with equipment recomendations, who better to ask than the people who selfhost. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
How does rule three apply to a comment? lol. I'm not the poster, I'm replying to a post that doesn't break Rule 3. Oh well. I tried
I think they nuked the whole thread.
Lmao. Why?
Dude, I do not pretend understand the inner machinations of a Lemmy mod. Rule 3 seems a blanket coverage for a lot of threads. But, I'm still out here repeating your recommends. Seems like it would be a jammy server for Docker containers at a good price.
Haha. No worries and no hard feelings towards the mods. This little computer has been a great machine for a bunch of things running on it. I installed debian on it and went to town. I've even made my Synology NAS a mounted storage on it and switched everything to debian. Thing's been a champ with no hiccups.
Ever since you posted that, I've been tinkering with the notion of replacing one of my Dell T320s with just such a unit. The Dell T320 have been good servers but cost me about $35 USD per month to run, whereas the Dell OptiPlex 3050 Micro you recommended would cost me about $3 to $5 to run per month. So, just in power savings alone, would pay for itself in less than a year. The Dell T320s put out a decent amount of heat as well, and aren't so quiet.....which doesn't bother me as much since I'm clinically deaf. LOL
I want your "clinically deaf" part. There are so many people in this world I'd rather not ever hear their voices. Lmao.
Jokes aside. If your current machines are working fine and the $35 a month isn't breaking the budget, then why replace them? I'll only replace this one I have when something major fails in it, like the motherboard just dying or something I can't fix. I've already replaced the fan on it. It was like $7 from eBay or something like that. But I'm that guy who never replaces things unless they absolutely need replacement. So, if you're not that guy, ignore my dumbass. lol
There are so many people in this world I’d rather not ever hear their voices. Lmao.
100%! It's a pain in the ass when I create music tho. Some frequencies I just can't hear well enough to make a decision. I lean on AI to assist me in the mastering process.
If your current machines are working fine and the $35 a month isn’t breaking the budget
Good point. The T320s are running fine. In fact I've not done anything to them since the beginning of the year except enjoy them. If I were to boil the ox down to the bouillon cube, I'm a little bored, and I've learned a lot since I first fired them up years ago, and I feel I could do things a lot better, cleaner, and more efficiently. Mostly bored tho. I like a good project.
Did you feel the smack on the back of your hand? Stop it. Don’t spend money you don’t need to spend. If anything, and you’re really, really bored, save your files and redo your work/reinstall the clean way you wish you had done to begin with. That’ll get you through a couple of weeks of busy work.
I run Nextcloud + Memories plugin on a Pi5 8GB with NVMe with a fanless Argon Neo case. Fast & very stable. One user but it gets quite heavy use.
An alternative you might prefer is a Beelink mini PC which I'm runnin with SSD's. I went for a Beelink EQ14 which i use for stuff like Paperless & Immich plus several other self host softwares. Picked it up cheap about a year ago before the AI nonsense pushed prices high. Frugal with electricity & more powerful than Pi. Ships with Windows which I ditched for Ubuntu Server. I've found it to run like a dream.
This is my exact setup and I’ve wondered if it would be enough. I haven’t spun up nextcloud yet, but I’ll have the need for it soon I think.
Do you run other apps through nextcloud? I have have things mostly as separate containers in the eq14, but wondered about experience from others. Is it more resource efficient to run something via nextcloud instead of separate container?
As far as Nextcloud plugins go, aside from Memories I just run the basics such as Contacts. I sync Joplin notes through it & it all syncs to 2 x desktops & a mobile. For me the Pi5 8GB with NVMe is plenty fast enough for Nextcloud & it's proved to be stable. I run it through Docker via Portainer. This device is also running Kopia for snapshot backups, reverse proxy & Linkwarden.
The EQ14 is running Docker, Portainer, Kopia & about 5 other self hosted apps, the most processor hungry of them being Immich & Paperless. I haven't tested against my Pi5 setup but its anecdotally massively faster & more stable than the Pi4B 4GB that I initially deployed Immich on. The Pi4 was really slow processing more than a few images at a time & sometimes crashed whereas the EQ14 doesn't blink adding say 100 images at a time, processes face recognition etc much faster too & has never crashed. Immich was the driving factor for me to upgrade to the EQ14 & its been great. It also chews through manual backups of Paperless documents in a fraction of the time that it took my Pi4B.
The EQ14 would have no issue whatsoever running Nextcloud. I'll be adding more self host stuff to it once I find anything else I think will be useful!
Depends if only a few people use it or tens. Then it can range from a potato to a decent oc not older than 8years.
literally anything with a cpu haha. maybe something after the pentiums? if you don't have a lot of users, you really don't need much
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