Selfhosted

It's not absolutely shit, it's a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn't working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it's now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don't know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it's not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can't remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

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.

Running a bunch of services here on a i3 PC I built for my wife back in 2010. I've since upgraded the RAM to 16GB, added as many hard drives as there are SATA ports on the mobo, re-bedded the heatsink, etc.

It's pretty much always ran on Debian, but all services are on Docker these days so the base distro doesn't matter as much as it used to.

I'd like to get a good backup solution going for it so I can actually use it for important data, but realistically I'm probably just going to replace it with a NAS at some point.

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.

Fuck ive been dealing with that + max RAM speed limitations for a month.

kind of.. a "AMD GX-420GI SOC: quad-core APU" the one with no L3 Cache, in an Thin Client and 8Gb Ram. old Laptop ssd for Storage (128GB) Nextcloud is usable but not fast.

edit: the Best thing: its 100% Fanless

I faced that only with different editions of Windows limiting it by itself.

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.

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.

Look for a processor for the same socket that supports more RAM and make sure the Motherboard can handle it - maybe you're lucky and it's not a limit of that architecture.

If that won't work, breakup your self-hosting needs into multiple machines and add another second hand or cheap machine to the pile.

I've worked in designing computer systems to handle tons of data and requests and often the only reasonable solution is to break up the load and throw more machines at it (for example, when serving millions of requests on a website, just put a load balancer in front of it that assigns user sessions and associated requests to multiple machines, so the load balancer pretty much just routes request by user session whilst the heavy processing stuff is done by multiple machines in such a way the you can just expand the whole thing by adding more machines).

In a self-hosting scenario I suspect you'll have a lot of margin for expansion by splitting services into multiple hosts and using stuff like network shared drives in the background for shared data, before you have to fully upgrade a host machine because you hit that architecture's maximum memory.

Granted, if a single service whose load can't be broken down so that you can run it as a cluster, needs more memory than you can put in any of your machines, then you're stuck having to get a new machine, but even then by splitting services you can get a machine with a newer architecture that can handle more memory but is still cheap (such as a cheap mini-PC) and just move that memory-heavy service to it whilst leaving CPU intensive services in the old but more powerful machine.

I moved from a Drll R710 with dual docket Xeons to a rack mount desktop case with a single Ryzen R5 5600G. I doubled the performance and halved the power consumption in one go. I do miss having idrac though. I need a KVM over IP solution but haven't stomached the cost yet. For how often I need it it's not an issue.

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.

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.