Is it a bad idea to use my desktop to self host?
What are the disadvantages?? Can they be overcome?
I use it primarily for programming, sometimes gaming and browsing.
I mean, I use a regular desktop computer that I just installed Ubuntu on and plugged it into an ethernet cable in the closet and closed the door. Now it’s my server. RGB and all.
RGB and all.
Proper server
Convenience is the main issue. AFAIK, as long as you secure your device, it’ll do the job
It’ll effect performance. It will need to be always on. It risks having interaction between your normal applications and server services. Also all your eggs in one basket if something goes wrong. That said it shoul be fine. Just take frequent snapshots and backups for important data
My first homelab was a synology NAS, and my gaming PC with a DIY linux hypervisor as the main OS, a Linix VM for hosting servers, and a Windows/Mac/Linux VM trio (each with GPU passthrough) that I would switch between for my workstation. I lost performance for sure, but it taught me a lot without the need to purchase more hardware.
If you consider it temporary, it’s not a bad way to learn.
And if you’re allergic to buying used, there’s always the mini computers.
Is power consumption a consideration? I want my self hosted server on 24/7, so a low-power single board is much more economical for me.
Also, are resources a problem? If your game is maxing out your rig and some batch job on a self hosted service starts, that could be annoying — or it could be a non-issue, just depends on your usage both as a desktop and a server.
By hosting services on your desktop, you are increasing your threat surface. Every additional software that you run increases your potential to catch malware. It also requires powering a beefy machine 24/7 to keep the service up, when in reality anything that isn’t a media server can run on 3rd gen Intel CPUs that have relatively low TDP.
i think its kinda silly
i see workstation graveyards in closets and garages that would make perfectly good white box servers… yeah theyre retail shit that mostly lack the ‘always on’ resilience of server level hardware, but a dedicated box for a server process is always better than a shared user/server environment.
youd prolly be hard pressed to find any old shitty retail box that you couldnt slap a nix variant.
keep good backups… in my experience, hardware dies in this order: spinning drive, power supply, motherboard
Whatever works for you. Just do it. It is convenient as f when you are just starting. You can always improve incrementally later on when (if) you encounter a problem.
Too much noise/power costs to run a small thing - get a pi and run it there. Too much impct on your desktop performance - okay, buy a dedicated monster. Want to deep dive into isolating things (and VMs are too much of a hassle) - get multiple devices.
No need to spend money (maybe sponsoring more e-waste) and time until it’s justified for your usecases.
It’s a terrible idea - do it anyway. Experimentation is how we learn.
If you have a reasonably modern multi-core system you probably won’t even notice a performance hit. The biggest drawback is that you have a single thing that is holding all your eggs. So if an upgrade goes wrong, or you’re taking things down for maintenance then everything is affected. And there can be conflicts between required versions of libraries, OS, etc. that each service needs.
Separating services, even logically, is a good idea. So I’d recommend you use containers or VMs to make it easier to just “whelp, that didn’t work” and throw everything away or start from scratch. It also makes library dependencies much easier to deal with.
So I already host a lot of stuff on a raspberry pi 4B. But when I tried to host Jellyfin, encoding was trouble on it, so I used my desktop to host Jellyfin as a quick solution, but using sshfs from the raspberry pi to access the media files. So now I wonder, is it worth it moving Jellyfin to something else? Is it worth it moving the media files to the desktop?
Is it performing well as is? sshfs isn’t very high performance, but if it’s working it’s fine - nfs would likely perform better though. I run jellyfin in a vm with an nfs mount to my file server and it works fine. Interface is zippy and scanning doesn’t take too long. I don’t get GPU acceleration but the CPU on that system (10th gen i7 I think) is fast enough that I haven’t had much trouble with transcoding (yet).
It’s actually not bad, surprisingly. I have had issues sometimes, but they’re network issues related to my router. I haven’t had them in a while.
If it’s working - that’s fine. Creating dependencies can make things more complex (you now need two systems running for one service to work) - but also isolating ‘concerns’ can be beneficial. Having a single “file server” lets me re-build other servers without worrying about losing important data for example. It separates system libraries and configuration from application data. And managing a file-server is pretty simple as the requirements are very basic (Ubuntu install with nfs-utils - and nothing else). It also lets me centralize backups as everything on the file server is backed-up automatically.
Things can be as simple or as complex as you want. I will re-iterate that keeping a “one server per service” mindset will pay off in the long-run. If you only have your desktop and a Pi then docker can help with keeping your services well isolated from each other (as well as from your desktop).
I would not recommend using your primary desktop for self hosting. If you just absolutely have to, install Virtual Box or some other hypervisor solution and run your servers in separate VM’s.
Use a dedicated host. It can be a desktop, server, Raspberry Pi, etc. Depending on your needs. Sooner or later you’ll find that hosting on a workstation that you use for other things is horribly inconvenient. Depending on what you’re self hosting, it can consume lots of resources. If you become dependent on the services you’re hosting, which is the point of self hosting to begin with, even really small things like rebooting your workstation can become really inconvenient.
I’ve got an old Dell PowerEdge ticking away in my basement that runs all my VM’s. I can reboot my desktop without interrupting any of my self hosted services. It also makes it easier to back up my VM’s and I can easily spin up a new one if needed. You have to be careful if you use server hardware though. The T430 that I have is pretty efficient but some servers can be thirsty little space heaters.
