i run homeassistant, pihole, 2 projects of mine using NodeJS, nextcloud, a very simple static website and Nginx for some DNS customization like pointing nc.home to a specific port. My pi is a 4GB one and for now the used RAM is not even 1 GB. I run debian with no graphical interface

How long is a piece of string?

Slaps board of Pi this bad boy can fit so much fucking dust in it.

Yes.

Xmpp, irc, email and websites are all pretty small in terms of resource usage. Where you’ll have problems are with heavy compute workloads like 3d rendering, AI, 3d gaming (sorry, no crysis), and crypto mining. They all can be done on a rpi but not done well.

It’s a great games console with archive.org retro games collection and retroPie installation.

Pretty much any containerized web app (pick any of the 100s posted here a week) that isn’t doing any crazy amount of work in the background x20. Thats what I’ve got and still tons of cpu and ram overhead

Don’t need to transcode though. Most devices can directstream completely fine

Sure it can, but it depends on what software you run and how much load you put on those services.

If you want email, just setup Zoho free

If you **really** want to host your own email then grab a cheap/free domain name from somewhere and use that instead of your main domain/address for your testing ans setup

Do all your learning on that email account and domain name that you can throw away.
Once your comfortable then you can think about forgetting about moving your main address as it’s not worth the hassle! :-D

You can fit lots of stuff in 4gb of ram. Just pile on services till it starts running low.

I serve several TB of Video movies, TV and music around the house. Jellyfin rocks.

That’s a great thread. That’s why you don’t want to host your own email. Well, if you’re planning to use it as a daily driver for an extended period of time. There’s guys who are out there with basically just managing that process as their full time job. (Not really, but almost — when does a hobbyist have that kind of free time?). You know there’s things like shinobi and private Servers that would likely see your server responding to port 25 in a few hours and it’s going to be game on for how good your security practices have been. I don’t want to expose my internal network to that as I’ll likely have file servers not too far off with security practices that are intended to be behind a firewall. But hey, if the guy wants to do it, he can.

Also of note which may be mentioned elsewhere-without business class service at your location, most ISP’s block mail, http and other ports at their side, so you’re dead in the water anyway.

NEVER transcode. Do it as a background task offline. Even GPUs and desktop servers are best offline.

Anything she puts her mind to!