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?
Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.
Totally agree, I’ll add that I run jellyfin, the *arrs, an admittedly low throughout ripping/encoding setup, and a few other containers on a single optiplex micro 7060 and there’s a lot of room leftover. I very much appreciate the laptop processor in it because it usually sits idle for 16 hours a day.