I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
It depends on what you are running, but at one point I had an Odroid N2+ with 8GB RAM running Home Assistant, mpd, Snap server, zwavejs, mympd, jellyfin, and Calibre, all in containers, controlling the house and providing music for the sound system, playing movies, and with no issues. It ran for 7 years. So you don’t need much; memory helps.
Oh - I take it back; after I put Jellyfin on it, it would struggle with transcoding. No GPU, old, weak CPU, whatever. But otherwise, it was fine.
At some point I realized I’d have to leave the computer with the house, because I have over 30 hardwired z-wave devices I’m not taking out if we sell, so I moved all of the services except Home Assistant and zwavejs to another computer.
My point is: old computers should be fine, assuming you’re not trying to run LLMs on them. Or going heavy video transcoding. Just for serving up some web applications? You don’t need much.