I dusted off my RPI4 and started tinkering with self-hosting things and it’s sparked a fire. Suddenly I have 7 docker containers running and I need more RAM, more space and I want something reliable with room to grow. I like small form factors but it doesn’t need to be RPI small. Any recs for your favorite hardware under $500?
Intel NUC. Myself I prefer Proxmox as the first layer (so I can do stuff remotelly), and Alpine Linux VM as a second layer.
This been rock stable for me for the past 1 year or so.
NUCs are great little boxes. I have extensive experience with them. Not a lot of room for RAID or other nice to haves, but besides that even in some pretty bad environments they just happily sit there chugging away year after year.
The fan can get gummed up, but if your environment is at all reasonable it’ll probably not be a problem. OTOH, you can buy these massive fanless cases for a NUC that make the whole question moot.
I’ve replaced fan once. Purchased from Ali. Works like a charm.
The reason why I had to replace fan is because it is CCTV-Viewer host and the app is not using hardware acceleration (not supported). Lots of cameras, CPU is usually around 60-70% 24/7 and temperature usually never drops below 80°c. It’s expected in my case.
The other NUC is running 24/7 as media center/home server for the past 2 years and to this day works like a charm.
What specs is yours if you don’t mind me asking? I have a 10th hosting Proxmox and 11th hosting ESXi, but both at 32GB. Wondering if I should take the plunge and just upgrade them both max out at 64GB.
My specs:
I can’t comment on your “Wondering if I should take the plunge” as it highly depends on use-case. At home I am not very into HA as it gets ridiculously expensive (and I am not making money out of my services, such as Jellyfin, Homeassistant, adblocking DNS and so on).
Exact same setup as you except a larger NVME. Makes sense, no need to sink excessive cash into it. :)
Wow, first I’m exposed to Proxmox, looks really cool. I’m currently handling remote via Cloudflare Tunnels and it’s working well but I’d love something that will manage multiple servers in the future and this looks like the ticket.
Well, this is not what I meant “remotelly” 😂. I realised I am too lazy to setup monitoring (Telegraf/VictoriaMetrics/Grafana) so I look into VM metrics in proxmox. Also I can reinstall VM remotelly if I fuck things up - very convenient.
Do you run off a relatively new NUC or an older one?
See https://lemmy.world/comment/522284
This is pretty much exactly what I do. I’m partial to Debian though.