Warehouse worker who self hosts stuff here.

It all started when I was a teenager and I lost access to my photobucket account…

If you go down the VPS route, a headscale server on a cheap $3.50 VPS would be the way to go. Wouldn’t even have to deal with IP addresses at that point, while still being able to self-host all your services, with the cheap VPS being a glorified switch/firewall.

A used mini computer, like a lenovo thinkcentre, hp prodesk mini, and dell optiplex micro.

Yep, my homeserver spends most of it’s time idling, so power management kicks in.

Now when one of my build VMs are running, it’ll get up to that range, but that’s why I said it runs at 10 watts usually

The last time I checked, mine runs at about 5-10 watts usually.

• Intel i7-3770
• 16gb DDR3
• 2 1TB SSDs

Depends on your NAS server. If you’re like me and using an old optiplex, you can fit WAY more 2.5" drives in it, and they’re pretty cheap. If you have an actual proper server chassis, then you probably want 3.5" NAS hard drives cuz warranty and all that.

distcc cluster?