I don‘t know if this is the right place to ask, but is this an OK build for a first start in selfhosting? Is there anything obvious I could improve? I‘d mainly run Nextcloud, Immich, some Docker containers and smaller web applications and cronjobs.
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I humbly disagree with others that 16 Gigz of ram is not enough. A. For the first server it is definitely enough, before you know what you really need. B. In current rampocalypse it would be crazy buying ram without knowing that you really need it (only for it to sit there unused later). Your setup is fine and only time and your inner hobbyist selfhoster will tell later what you need.
Edit: and fyi I curretly do have 48 Gigz 😂, bought it a year ago very cheap and my system uses 10. Therefore I have set a high ARC to 16 GB. I used to try local LLM but didn’t find it useful for the high power consumption. Just wanted to show you where my opinion come from. Nowadays I wouldn’t buy more than strictly necessary.
Depends on the docker containers but it’s way overkill than you might think.
Since you’re starting it may be worth looking into used office PCs like the thinkcentre from Lenovo or other brands(no tiny or ssf since they don’t have to room for drives). They often offer good perfomance for the price and the power consumption is not too high.
I run a lot of containers in my homelab, which consists of an OrangePi (similar to an RaspberryPi 5). It works surprisingly well, and was only (at the time) $250 for the board, case, and emmc drive.
I made a very similar build almost 2 years ago.
I did not like the Jonsbo N4. The HDD temps were bad. The case amplified HDD noise and was a pain to build in. I used a Silverstone SFX power supply. I had two of those PSUs fail in less than a year.
After the second expensive SFX PSU failed, I decided I did not want to buy another. I changed cases to the Fractal Design Node 804 and bought an inexpensive ATX PSU. I have been much happier with my build after those changes. My HDD temps dropped by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. The case is much quieter and I was impressed by the quality.
Agree on the Jonsbo. I have an N1 and it is not great for cooling HDD either. Jonsbo seem to design their cases as ideas and never actually test them.
Just about anything is OK for a server, I use whatever hardware I get from work thats being decommissioned.
The biggest limit I see is the ram. Depending on what you spin up and how, it’ll be the tightest budget per service.
I have used a laptop without a screen as a server, raspberry pis, 10 year old laptop, proliant server, something with a via itx motherboard and a cheap cpu, like literal trash.
So yeah your build is more than fine. Don’t stress your budget too much, but if you can afford this you will have better than my first “server”. Remember to have fun with it!Ran a server off a fantastic workstation laptop that a user dropped off their bed, driving a USB stick through the power button and breaking the screen. Had to power it on with a stick directly poking the motherboard but it worked flawlessly for many years
Your server looks fabulous, and I’m not discouraging you from pursuing it in the least. However, if I may draw from my own personal experience and what I am currently running, it may give you some ideas. Currently, I am running 53 containers on a Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 and 32 GB RAM. Just checked and it’s load average at this moment is: 0.47, 0.60, 0.73. Meaning it’s pretty much in an idle state except for logging in just now. Grand total cost was less than $200. It consumes about $8 USD/month.
Unless you’re going to get into selfhosting heavy AI models, most stock PC, office discards, etc built in the last 10 years will do just fine for a homelab, with a little love like some additional RAM or a dual nic card. Immich and Nextcloud will probably require a bit more than 16 GB RAM running together. I don’t run Immich, but I do run Nextcloud and it does just fine with the above set up. No lags, stutters, etc.
I have that same case in black, overall very similar setup. I like how it looks, but if I would change one thing in my server it would be the case. It’s quite a hassle to work inside of, and for its size, only being able to hotswap 4 HDDs is very little compared to other cases you can find.
It’s not bad by any means, but you can get better
Might be abit much but double your ram if you intend on using a lot of apps
I agree. The most limiting factor is still memory for me. And I’m max out currently of my motherboard (128gb).
Recently thessecond limiting factor is actually cpu. But that is due to my gitlab runners.
how are you using 128 GB? Genuinely curious because I run over 20 services with only 8 GB
- I run 50+ websites
- MariaDB instances
- PostgreSQL instances
- Docker containers
- Mbin, Nextcloud, GitLab, GitLab runners, gitea, bitcoind, fulcrum, grafana, prometheus, influxdb, Synapse, Angie, telegraf and various other services like fail2ban etc. etc.
All optimized for performance and fine tuned as well, eg. lets say you run mariadb vs how I run it:
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 8G innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2 innodb_log_file_size = 2G innodb_log_buffer_size = 32M innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct = 90 innodb_io_capacity=5000 innodb_io_capacity_max=20000 innodb_read_io_threads=8 innodb_write_io_threads=8 query_cache_type = 1 query_cache_limit = 2M query_cache_min_res_unit = 2k query_cache_size = 128M tmp_table_size= 128M max_heap_table_size= 128M [mysqld] max_connections = 200 character_set_server = utf8mb4 collation_server = utf8mb4_general_ci transaction_isolation = READ-COMMITTED binlog_format = ROW innodb_file_per_table=1 # Increase open files based limits.conf value open_files_limit=65535Same idea for Postgresql… You can run “postgres” or… actually run postgresql in production correctly like:
shared_buffers = 6GB work_mem = 20MB maintenance_work_mem = 2GB maintenance_io_concurrency = 200 max_worker_processes = 14 max_parallel_workers_per_gather = 4 max_parallel_maintenance_workers = 4 max_parallel_workers = 12 synchronous_commit = off commit_delay = 300 checkpoint_timeout = 30min max_wal_size = 60GB min_wal_size = 4GBActually now that I check your username I think I have seen your instances before, though it seems like your website is down at the moment. But thank you for service to open source !
nah its not down… maybe you use a VPN.
I do. Do you block all VPNs? Or is it just rate limiting?
Your part list is extremely similar to my main home server. You’ll do just fine with the hardware you’ve selected. It is a GREAT starting point.
For context I have been running an AMD 5600g alongside 32gb gskill ddr4 RAM since covid, tho back then it was a 2600x paired with an ancient FirePro for graphics. Boot drive is m.2 ssd and I have 4 hand-me-down enterprise HDDs for storage. (I originally was using whatever spinning rust I already had on-hand at that time, but I have replaced them since)
You can get Ryzen 5650G Pro from ebay that will support ECC. Just make sure it’s not vendor locked.
Obviously you’d need to adjust mobo, not sure if Gigabyte supports ecc. Asrock was pretty cool with ECC.
I’d recommend using eficient procesors as well, so with ryzen with grafics and efficience it’s GE at the end. I recently switched ryzen 5 5500 for ryzen 5 4600GE (because 5500 doesn’t have efficient variant) and the consumption halved (- 30Wh). And both were/are basically idle with very low loads.
16GB RAM may be a bit low for the setup, as others have suggested, but I’m currently running Immich and Nextcloud and a handful of other small services (like FMD) dockerized in an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve experienced very few issues. In my opinion, you could find a used Ryzen 3600 or even older, and 16GB will probably serve you just fine. You could save yourself a hundred bucks or more.
That said, what you’ve got here is nice and future-proof for quite a while, even if you end up going down the rabbit hole. You might eventually need another 16GB of RAM, but maybe not until after the AI bubble pops 🙂
If you’re already going for spinning rust hard disks, why limit yourself to the 3 TB ones? IMHO, these days, spinning rust only makes sense at 8 TB+ per disk.
I have them at home and as such don‘t need to spend money on them.
Story of my life
Massive overkill!
That’s a great Home Theater PC. Hook it up to your TV and install KDE Plasma (distro of your choice 👍) then just crank up the global desktop zoom to like 225% and get:
- A real wireless mouse that has a long range (e.g. $10 TEKNET cheapo deal with 10% off coupon today, LOL! https://a.co/d/02qG1oHO )
- A wireless keyboard/trackpad combo that’s made for that kind of thing (they’re all terrible keyboards—it’s only purpose is to get you through the boot menu/rescue process if something horrible goes wrong). Use SSH for doing any real work on the thing.
Now install Docker and all the containers/servers you want!
I have a ~14yo HTPC with a mostly modern GPU (8GB) that only has 8GB of RAM and four cores on some old AMD CPU. It’s running four separate servers for my self-host purposes and it doesn’t break a sweat.
I would probably go Intel with iGPU for the transcoding and acceleration for Immich. i3-14100 is fast and cheap.
Otherwise you definitely have far more CPU power than you’ll need for those apps so no worries there.
It is but ddr5 is not cheap
It supports DDR4 if you buy a motherboard that supports DDR4 too.
Ohhhhh… Let me see if this Dell I’m using can run ddr4, I would like to have 16GB of ram
FYI: I’m a noob myself.
Looks fine, but if you’re looking to mess around with a first build then you could go cheaper. Secondhand hardware would save you money, especially since older hardware is great for server use. At least you’re saving money with AM4 and DDR4.
Some thoughts:
- I went with an Intel CPU for Jellyfin transcoding.
- 16gb ram is enough to start and I host tons of stuff with that much, but the more ram the better. Having 2 more ram slots for future expansion would serve you well (but not essential).
- Faster networking would be better. Your mobo has 1 gigabit LAN. Again not a deal breaker. You can add faster networking yourself later.
This guy makes great videos, but you have to be careful to not overcomplicate things or chase specs that pro home server guys want that make no difference to noobs.
I recently picked up a used i3 14th gen to add to my server rack. Its great except ddr5 💸
Note about the network: it really doesn’t matter how fast your server can go if the rest of the stuff connected to it can’t also handle it.
You have a server with a 10 gigabit network port, you also need the cabling, router, switches, and other hardware that can handle 10 gigabit.
