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?

  • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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    12 hours ago

    CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up.

    Not sure how recently you ran this, or what all your were running, but in the past couple of years Paper has hit some pretty major milestones in unlocking threaded processing. Barring some sort of spammy 0-tick redstone nonsense or over the top plugins, I’d wager a Raspberry Pi 4 could handle up to about 5 or 6 friends without seeing any TPS dips. Its really remarkable how far they’ve pushed performance recently.

    • hperrin@lemmy.ca
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      12 hours ago

      That’s really cool! I just run the vanilla server, but maybe I should check out Paper. Can it import worlds from vanilla?

      • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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        11 hours ago

        Yes, it absolutely can, it’s super easy! Just swap your Minecraft .jar with Paper and it’ll do the rest. It’s a tiny bit harder to go back, but only marginally.

        Out of the box, aside from huge performance benefits, Paper is virtually indistinguishable from vanilla, but it also opens the door to a whole world of easy-to-use server-side plugins.

        Edit: (you should still make a backup before swapping, just in case)