Hi friends. I’m a newbie in self-hosting, though I’ve been managing (virtual) linux servers at work for a couple of years. I’m completely ignorant on the hardware choices out there, hopefully you can point me to the right direction.
Here are my requisites:
- Low power consumption, I plan to have it connected 24/7 and I’m kinda concerned on how much it will impact the electricity bill
- Ethernet port, preferably gigabit but whatever
- Graphical performance is not important as I don’t plan to connect it to any display. As long as I can ssh into it, I’m good.
Services I plan on installing, for starters:
- casaOS
- pi-hole, or equivalent
- Home Assistant
- Kitchen Owl (nice to have)
- Paperless-ngx (nice to have)
I live in europe and my budget is around 80 euros or so. Thanks in advance!
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HP EliteDesk 800 G3 Mini (or equivalent)? You can get them for pretty cheap on eBay.
A raspberry pi or orange pi could definitely run all of those things at very low power consumption.
A used Android pixel phone. You can root it and install Pideploy and run PiHole through it.
I have an old Pixel 3a doing exactly this. The other services I don’t quite know if they have an Android implementation.
Doesn’t suit your every use case, but I figured I’d share.
termux-root has a docker package. That still doesn’t cover everything but a lot of popular services have docker images
Ooo learn something new every day. I’m going to have to try this out later. Thanks!
At around 80 euros then for lowest power you should go Raspberry Pi, for most performance while still being low power an old business laptop is fine, and since you don’t need the screen you can buy one with a broken screen.
Risking sounding like a broken record, I always suggest Tiny/Mini/Micro 1L form factor office PCs. Lenovo, Dell, and HP all create ultra small office PCs that make great low power servers. A Pi will use 5-9w at idle, while these PCs will use 11-13w idle. They also use more standard components such as NVME drives, 2.5" drives, and replaceable RAM. Easy to find under $100 USD used, I’m sure you can find them under 100 euro.
Good point.
The Pi Zero is 2w max… It’s downside is it draws 2w MAX. Power is power, only so much you can do in 2w. As you pointed out, the 4 and 5 can do more, because they can draw more, (or they draw more so can do more, it’s all related).
The key seems to be ability to minimize the idle power while still capable of ramping up to something useful when you need it - like the micros you’ve listed.
We buy the HP Pro/Elitedesk 1L pcs as backup servers and attach storage.
Works pretty good and they are pretty cheap with the power they can provide.Bonus: there is a literally endless supply of used x86 SFF hardware from large institutions, so unlike SBC’s, there’s no special, weird supply chain managed by an English educational nonprofit that could just suddenly decide to not sell to the public for years at a time.
could you please elaborate? what is SFF hardware?
SFF = Small Form Factor. It’s smaller than traditional ATX computers but can still take the same RAM, processors and disks. Motherboards and power supplies tend to be nonstandard however. Idle power consumptions are usually very good.
USFF = Ultra Small Form Factor. Typically a laptop chipset + CPU in a small box with an external power supply. Somewhat comparable with SBCs like Raspberry Pis. Very good idle power consumption, but less powerful than SFF (and/or louder due to smaller cooler) and often don’t have space for standard disks.
SBC = Single Board Computer.
Hi, sorry I just saw this. “SFF” is short for “small form factor.” It’s just industry jargon for “a small PC.” They tend to be designed to use less power which makes them a good fit for home servers. Pretty much any line of PC sold to businesses, like Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk, will have small form factor variants.
Lenovo m900 tiny. Low cost and power.
Think centre tiny gang rise up :-) !
They’re also surprisingly easy to upgrade for their size. Swapped RAM, CPU, and hard drive in about 15 minutes total on one of mine.
I second Lenovo tiny. I have 3 x m920q with a gigabit switch and total combined power draw is about 53w
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Have a look at the ServeTheHome site and channel on youtube … he’s done a load of good reviews of AliExpress devices and some tiny/mini/micro devices (think thinclients)
He covers power consumption and some interesting points (like which recent multi-Gb NICs are supported by pfSense / Proxmox / etc)
Just watching those should at least help you decide what you need.
I was going to build my own virt server and I ended up with a low power, silent, passively cooled box to run all my VMs in… for much cheap.
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I have an Intel NUC I got on eBay for £50. It’s running 30 containers, 10W draw
I just got a mini AMD box from CWWK off Amazon and I’m quite impressed. I even got a free CPU upgrade (ordered a 5600u but received 5825u)
This serves a couple services, incl. kitchenowl and paperless-ngx very fine for me.
Once, I got it for around 45€.A refurbished elite desk sff PC works great.
Not to state the obvious one, but there’s always the Raspberry Pi.
The supply has gotten better on those, so you can probably pick one up in your price range, and the power draw is super minimal.
Raspberry Pi was my first choice, but apparently I can’t even back order it :/
Alternatively, there are also some options from pine64.com, maybe scroll through there! Same for odroid.nl
That reminds me, I do own a pine64 device! It was the first thing I got on Kickstarter.
It’s a Pine A64, with 2gb RAM. I wonder if it has enough power to run all those things. It’s a budget device from 8 years ago, probably gonna have a hard time but I’ll give it a try if I manage to find it!
If it’s been a while since you checked, it’s worth checking again. RPi has been becoming more available over the last month or two, and I was able to get one of the new RPi 5!
Someone put together a great locator tool
Try a used laptop. Cheap, power efficient, built in UPS, small. Can be quite powerful and some are even upgradable
absolutely this.
Even has a KVM for emergency access ;)
Dammit, I have a few of those, you’re killing my excuse to buy a new toy!
Let me help you with that: what if you need more power? or what if you need something smaller due to size constraints or maybe what if the old battery can’t handle 24/7?. Pick one!
