Do you have access to Raspberry Pi clones like Orange Pis etc? They’re often cheaper and you can order them straight from China.

8 GB RAM or more. OS installed either to SSD, or a HDD that does not store service data (for performance). a modern CPU with at least 4 cores. modern means it has at least AES and AVX2 instruction sets to do math quickly, but probably you can just pick one made in the last 10 years, with less years generally meaning better energy efficiency.

what kind of services do you want to host on it? initial plans, perhaps longer term plans?

That very much depends on what you want it to do (what is “everything”) and how many users you have.

Why would raspberry pi’s be expensive but the hardware to build a server be any cheaper?

Take a look at some N100 devices (or N95/N150).

any old laptop with at least a third gen intel or something comparable works. you do want to get some extra storage via a cheap old hdd

I have a old optiplex 7010 with i7 and 8gig RAM. About 70€ on eBay. I upgraded it with a nvme SSD to bolt from (great tutorial here) and salvaged an old SATA HDD from an external case.

Currently runs 11+ container in proxmox without issues. Way beefier than a raspberry pi.

I also have room for 3 more hdds to put in a mergerfs system and 2 additional pcie slots für things like a faster LAN card or an additional SATA controller

What are you intending to run on this server?

• If it is just PiHole, you can basically get the weakest computer you can find.

• If you want lots of storage space, you will need to make sure you have a case and motherboard that will accommodate the drives.

• If you are running encryption on those drives as well, you will need a CPU more powerful than what comes in a Pi, but nothing crazy.

• If you are running lots and lots of VMs, you will want lots of RAM. A linux VM will use maybe a few GB each depending on what software each is running internally, a windows vm will use a bit more.

• If you are doing AI workloads, you will need a graphics card.

raspberry pi’s arent the best option anyway since you need to add on a hat just to get some SATA ports. i think Odroid has some boards with sata connectors. zimaboard or zimablade are some other options off the top of my head

A repurposed old PC with something like yunohost, generic Debian, or some lightweight Linux will probably get you what you need.

It heavily depends on what programs you want to run.

Raspberry PI

This also shouldn’t be your default option. Your default should be whatever you have laying around, and a lot of people have a Raspberry Pi sitting idle, hence why people use them.

What specs

That depends on what you want to do with it.

For example, if you want to host a video server, then you’ll want something that can handle transcoding. Check the Jellyfin docs for details, which recommends an N100 or better.

List all the things you need and want, and then look up what the requirements are. Basic file hosting is pretty light, so you really don’t need much (hence the Raspberry Pi rec).

I personally use an old PC with the following specs:

• Ryzen 1700
• 16GB RAM
• GTX 750 Ti GPU
• 2 8TB HDDs (bought for the server)
• 1 SSD for boot (128 GB, just needs to store the OS)

This is way overkill for what I need, but I had it laying around. You could even start with a laptop, you’ll just have limited storage (can get a USB emclosure of you want).

If you don’t have something, maybe a mini PC would work (minisforum, beelink, etc). Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know what you’re planning to run on it. You probably don’t need anything fancy, your biggest requirement might be the GPU/iGPU if you’re planning to do transcoding.

The minimum spec is whatever e-waste you can find that still powers on.

My home server has an i3-4160, 10 gigabytes of mis-matched RAM, a ten-year-old 240 GB SSD with 36000 hours on it, and three 1 TB hard drives in a RAID5 array each with ~25000 power-on hours. It runs Proxmox on the metal with a virtualized OPNsense, Nextcloud, and Jellyfin server (plus smaller services). Jank levels are high, but not fatal, and it was mostly free.

Keep an eye out for people trashing perfectly good desktop machines because Windows 10 is being retired.

If you want a server that “does it all” then you would need to get the most decked-out top of the line server available… Obviously that is unrealistic, so as others have mentioned, knowing WHAT you want to run is required to even begin to make a guess at what you will need.

Meanwhile here’s what I suggest – Grab any desktop machine you can find to get yourself started. Load up an OS, and start adding services. Maybe you want to run a personal web server, a file server, or something more extensive like Nextcloud? Get those things installed, and see how it runs. At some point you will start seeing performance issues, and this tells you when it’s time to upgrade to something with more capability. You may simply need more memory or a better CPU, in which case you can get the parts, or you may need to really step up to something with dual-CPU or internal RAID. You might also consider splitting services between multiple desktop machines, for instance having one dedicated NAS and another running Nextcloud. Your personal setup will dictate what works best for you, but the best way to learn these things is to just dive in with whatever hardware you can get ahold of (especially when it’s free), and use that as your baseline for any upgrades.

This depends entirely on what you want to run. A pihole needs vastly different resources than for example offering jellyfin to 20 simultaneous users. Both can be hosted at home.

When I started my media server in 2020 I used e-waste from my building. Had an i7 3770, 16gb ddr3 ram and an rx460 graphics card. I ran jellyfin, ultrasonic and audiobookshelf for 10-15 people with no problem on this hardware. Anything made within the last decade should provide a good starting point for you.