To add yet another advice:

• Get a Lenovo or dell slim client (not a nuc/mini pc but the bigger version with data ports. Roughly same power but more useful hardware)

• get 2*4 tb hdd for mass storage

• a 500gb ssd for the os. If you have the money, maybe even 2 of them and clone them

• the os is tricky. You can use proxmox, which is basically like Linux but as you have multiple vms in there you can have multiple Linux installed to take care of. Another choice would be something like truenas, casaOs, unraid etc. I can’t recommend one there, I use proxmox and its great if you like CLi/sah

• to make it accessible from not home, use tailscale. You can also use a domain/dns to not have to remember ips

• if you have the option, take a mother thin client or pc with same amount of storage to another location and install a backup system, like proxmox backup system. That way your data is safe. Take a look at encryption if you dong trust the other place.

• my backup server draws 15w idle and 40-50w when its working

• my home lab is drawing 30w idle and 60 under load

• its just another factor to be aware of

Have fun!

If you have any old hardware/laptop laying around then use that until you nail down what you actually want to do and need.

for music both jellyfin and navidrome are subsonic API compatible for use with mobile and desktop apps (like symfonium and feishin). Some people choose to just use jellyfin instead of a dedicated music service. Personally i still run navidrome for music. I give some thoughts on that here

Used business desktop from eBay is what I run. With what you want to run, you’ll be fine with even 10 year old hardware. I’m running a dozen services on 10 year old basic business hardware with no issues. With regards to media though: if you’re not getting a dedicated GPU, get a Intel 7xxx or later CPU so you have Quick sync for transcoding.

I run Ubuntu Server on one, proxmox on another. Both have their pros and cons. Depends on what you want to do. If your plan is just to run everything in containers (and it should be), Ubuntu with docker is plenty. If you plan on playing around with VMs, go proxmox.

As for what services, here’s a huge list of different self hostable services grouped by category/function: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ Most have a demo site or a quick install guide for docker that makes it easy to try stuff out.

Avoid selfhosted email if you can… it’s a whole different animal.

Do not go for server hardware, used consumer hardware is good enough for you use cases. Basically any machine from the last 5-10 yeare is powerfull enough to handle the load.

Most difficult decision is on the GPU or transcoding hardware for your jellyfin. Do you want to be power efficient? Then go with a modern but low end intel CPU there you got quicksync as transcoding engine. If not, i would go for a low end NVIDIA GPU like the 1050ti or a newer one, and for example an old AMD CPU like the 3600.

For storage, also depends on budged. Having a backup of your data is much more important then having redundancy. You do not need to backup your media, but everything that is important to you,lime the photos in immich etc.

I would go SSD since you do not need much storage, a seperate 500 GB drive for your OS and a 4 TB one for the data. This is much more compact and reduces power consumption, and especially for read heavy applications much more durable and faster inoperation, less noise etc.

Ofc, HDDs are good enough for your usecase and cheaper (factor 2.5-3x cheaper here) .

Probably 8-16 GB RAM would be more then enough.

For any local redundancy or RAID i would always go ZFS.

I would still consider myself a noob but i do feel accomplished enough to answer this properly.

Hardware depends on your budget. It does not need to be bleeding edge either, i would focus on a good server case that makes it easy to upgrade over time and maybe fits a few harddrives if you don’t plan on having a nas.

Also make sure to check how much sata connections your motherboard can handle, using an m.2 slots may occupy some of the physical sata connections.

I highly, highly recommend proxmox for an OS.

You can set up every different service into its own lxc container, its wonderful to know you can experiment with whatever and everything else will be unaffected and just keep working. Within lxc things can just run using docker (though this is officially not recommended it works fine). The resource sharing between lxc containers is excellent. Taking snapshots a breeze. And when an lxc is not enough you can easily spin up some vm with whatever distro or even windows also. Best server-choice i made ever!

The zfs format for your storage pool is also very good. And you definitely want redundancy, redundancy makes it so x amount of drives can fail and the system just keeps running like normal while you replace the broken drive, otherwise a single drive failing ruins all your data.

Unless you make every drive its own pool with specific items that you backup separately but thats honestly more troublesome then learning how to setup a pool.

How you want a pool and how much redundancy is a personal choice but i can tell you how i arranged mine.

I have 5 identical drives which is the max My system can handle. 4 of them are in a pool with a raidz1 configuration (equivalent to raid-5) this setup gives me 1 drive of redundancy and leaves me 3 drives of actual usable space.

I could have added the fifth drive in the pool fo more but i opted not too, to protect my immich photons against complete critical failure. This fifth drive is unmounted when not used.

Basically my immich storage are in a dataset, which you can think of as a directory on your pool that you can assign to different lxc to keep things separate.

Every week a script will mount the fifth drive, rsync copy my immich dataset from the pool onto it. Unmount the drive again. Its a backup of the most important stuff outside of the pool.

This drive can also be removed from the cases front in an emergency, which is part of why I recommend spending some time finding a case that fits your wants more then worrying about how much ram.

Best of luck!

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Remember that RAID and redundancy is not backup.

Try to 3-2-1, or something similar/better, if you can.

I am fairly sloppy here, and I am also very cheap. I have multiple copies in my home for important stuff (mainly Immich), the in use copy being on SSD and a few backups on spinning rust. I have a raspberry pi with an external HDD at family’s place, with a daily rsync+snapshot, for off site backups.

Of course, I’ve never had a catastrophic failure, so who knows how smooth that would be…

You’re going to want a NAS. Most consumer systems can only wire up four ssds/nvme ssds. If you want 6 TB of capacity and you want redundancy. That means that minimum raid one and 12 TB of capacity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

If you want to self-host email or websites, I’d use a VPS for those use cases. For websites, a $30/year VPS would be more than sufficient. You can try host at home, but hosting those things from a residential IP doesn’t always work well.

What would you guys recommend for a server machine?

I would recommend buying fairly modern equipment, say within the past 5 years or so. Desktops, workstations, with a few additions/adjustments, can make excellent, energy efficient servers. As far as RAM, if your equipment takes DDR3, you will escape the ridiculous current price gouging. For RAM, I shop at MemoryStock. HDD drives still make good storage units, tho I go with SSD for the OS, and HDD for everything else. I would stay far away from enterprise type equipment, even though the prices may be tempting. The money you may save buying cheap, enterprise equipment will be spent on your power bill.

Redundancy covers a lot of ground. You can have a redundant server to fall back to should the wheels fall off of the main server. In the case of say a NAS, RAID gives you redundancy where if one drive fails, you can hot swap it for a fresh one and keep on rocking…pretty much. Redundancy can also apply to backups. I have a main, daily backup, and the same backed up to two different locations.

In addition to equipment selection, you will need to do some reading up on securely setting up a server, if you’ve never done so. Also start thinking about firewalls, WAFs, etc. I would recommend going through the Linux Upskill Challenge. Get your server set up and secured. Familiarize yourself with your server. Add a single service, and play around with that until things start to gel. Then you can think about slowly adding additional services.

Machine wise anything will work. Give yourself a chassis with room to add more disks down the road or just build your storage setup in a way that gives you what flexibility you need (though that tends to come with sacrifices).

I use Nextcloud for general file syncing between devices as occaisonal small file sharing.

I have no idea what to recommend for hardware but for OS I suggest Truenas Scale. It’s pretty easy to setup has a webui and it’s intuitive. As for hardware I say you go with a hba board for disks, a GPU for jellyfin transcoding and immich ai features, as for file sharing I use samba, which is kinda shitty but I didn’t found something easier.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

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