Selfhosted

It's not absolutely shit, it's a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn't working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it's now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don't know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it's not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can't remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

Running a bunch of services here on a i3 PC I built for my wife back in 2010. I've since upgraded the RAM to 16GB, added as many hard drives as there are SATA ports on the mobo, re-bedded the heatsink, etc.

It's pretty much always ran on Debian, but all services are on Docker these days so the base distro doesn't matter as much as it used to.

I'd like to get a good backup solution going for it so I can actually use it for important data, but realistically I'm probably just going to replace it with a NAS at some point.

Fuck ive been dealing with that + max RAM speed limitations for a month.

My first @home server was an old defective iMac G3 but it did the job (and then died for good) A while back, I got a RP3 and then a small thin client with some small AMD CPU. They (barely) got the job done.

I replaced them with an HP EliteDesk G2 micro with a i5-6500T. I don't know what to do with the extra power.

I used to self host some stuff on an old 2011 iMac. Worked fine, actually

I'm still interested in Self-Hosting but I actually tried getting into self-hosting a year or so ago. I bought a s***** desktop computer from Walmart, and installed window server 2020 on it to try to practice on that.

Thought I could use it to put some bullet points on my resume, and maybe get into self hosting later with next cloud. I ended up not fully following through because I felt like I needed to first buy new editions of the server administration and network infrastructure textbooks I had learned from a decade prior, before I could continue with giving it an FQDN, setting it up as a primary DNS Server, or pointing it at one, and etc.

So it was only accessible on my LAN, because I was afraid of making it a remotely accessible server unless I knew I had good firewall rules, and had set up the primary DNS server correctly, and ultimately just never finished setting it up. The most ever accomplished was getting it working as a file server for personal storage, and creating local accounts with usernames and passwords for both myself and my mom, whom I was living with at the time. It could authenticate remote access through our local Wi-Fi, but I never got further.

Wow, it's been a long time since I had hardware that awful.

My old NAS was a Phenom II x4 from 2009, and I only retired it a year and a half ago when I upgraded my PC. But I put 8GB RAM into that since it was a 64-bit processor (could've put up to 32GB I think, since it had 4 DDR3 slots). My NAS currently runs a Ryzen 1700, but I still have that old Phenom in the closet in case that Ryzen dies, but I prefer the newer HW because it's lower power.

That said, I once built a web server on an Arduino which also supported websockets (max 4 connections). That was more of a POC than anything though.

I'm hosting a minio cluster on my brother-in-law's old gaming computer he spent $5k on in 2012 and 3 five year old mini-pcs with 1tb external drives plugged into them. Works fine.

Oldest I got is limited to 16GB (excluding rPis). My main desktop is limited to 32GB which is annoying, because I sometimes need more. But, I have a home server with 128GB of RAM that I can use when it's not doing other stuff. I once needed more than 128GB of RAM (to run optimizations on a large ONNX model, iirc), so had to spin up an EC2 instance with 512GB of RAM.

I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.

I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.

It's not new, but it's not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn't actually require that much compute power. Thus, it's a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it's idle most of the time so it doesn't use much power anyway.