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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I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that's off the table. I'll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that "does it all" remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
It depends what you want to do with it. What do you want the server to do?
Right now I want to host movies, photos, automatic backups, files in general. Also use it for the smart home that I'm slowly putting together, basic stuff... for starters.
Someone mentioned that if I want to host 4k content I should go for a 7th gen Intel CPU or newer for HVAC support, something I didn't know, but that showcases exactly the sort of restrictions that I had in mind when I submitted this post.
Sorry it took me a while to respond, didn't expect to have this many responses.
So yes and no on that recommendation. If you are just hosting content for local consumption, transcoding is unnecessary since you have the network bandwidth to just throw the data directly to whatever is playing it. So weaker hardware is perfectly fine. If you are doing lots of concurrent streams or there is network access outside the house, the limited bandwidth can become an issue so transcoding suddenly matters and more powerful hardware comes into play.
I have used many ARM SBCs and a few low-power Intel boards like my current N100 and they’ve all been fine. While I generally dislike Intel their quicksync is very useful in media server configurations. If you are going to be doing a lot of live transcodes, I would consider throwing an ARC GPU in there and having jellyfin utilize the transcode capabilities of the Intel GPU instead of the CPU as it can handle more simultaneous streams. Beware the xe driver as there are issues with it in certain configurations. Same with HuC/GuC. The older standard driver is more likely to just work. Jellyfin and the archlinux wiki have great documentation on this.
NVIDIA used to be top tier here but their transcode tech is pretty old by this point and the quality, while acceptable, isn’t the best. Intel beats them. AMD, generally a preference for me, has a terrible media transcoder. Easily the worst quality of all of them. For raw compute and pushing pixels, AMD all the way but for transcode I would pass.
So to summarize: cheap out if it’s just local access. Transcode is pretty much unneeded. If it’s outside the home and/or had many streams at the same time, Intel for the GPU and AMD for the CPU.
I live in Brazil too and bought a R$120 old HP computer running Windows XP on MercadoLivre. Works decently enough for a Minecraft server after an upgrade (4 to 8GB of RAM). Old computers are great for price and they're good if you can upgrade them.
For general purposes, get something better than what I bought since it is not the fastest (even though it runs the Minecraft server software alright, it still lags). Maybe upgrading with an SSD would help performance.
Rather than give you specific recommendations, here's some guidance for parts
Mobo: The more slots you have for RAM and storage, the better.
CPU: literally anything. More cores and faster cores are ideal, but CPU requirements for these things are generally lower than a desktop.
RAM: Buy 1 stick of the fastest and highest capacity RAM your motherboard can handle. When you're ready or you start to see slowdown, buy another of the same stick. You can get far on 16-32GB, you won't need much more until later.
Storage: an SSD for the OS and one or more HDDs for storage.
PSU: generally anything in the 500-700 range will be good. You'll want more if you plan to put a GPU in, though.
A repurposed old PC with something like yunohost, generic Debian, or some lightweight Linux will probably get you what you need.
It heavily depends on what programs you want to run.
I run about thirty services off of an old Dell workstation that I “acquired” from my last corporate job. That includes a full Servarr stack. I’m pretty sure whatever you have will probably do the trick.
Do you have access to Raspberry Pi clones like Orange Pis etc? They’re often cheaper and you can order them straight from China.
The one you already have and/or if a raspberry pi 2 (all) can do it…. So can you. It’s not a game, you don’t need a RTX 9090Ti Super Omega Beta Pizza to run it.
That very much depends on what you want it to do (what is "everything") and how many users you have.
Why would raspberry pi's be expensive but the hardware to build a server be any cheaper?
Scalpers for highly sought-after hardware or just general lack of supply in specific regions.
A CPU that can run Linux along with some networking
Literally any old PC is likely fine. It may be slow, it may struggle or even fail with some of the very complex software (perhaps you will encounter timeouts, or you will spend so much time waiting for memory to swap in or out to disk that it won't be worth using) but you can run Linux itself on a potato and if your machine isn't powerful enough, maybe you can get a second one and run different stuff on each, or just scale down your expectations and don't try to self-host LITERALLY everything just because you can. Certain services are very intense, others will run on a very small piece of a potato.
A raspberry pi 4 or 5 and some fast USB 3 hard drives.