EDIT: Thank you for all the comments and suggestions! I’m sorry I can’t reply to everything but I have a list now of hardware to look at. I appreciate that everyone has been so helpful! I’ll post an update once I buy one and get it going.
I’ve been running a Plex server for music off my gaming laptop for a few months and (I think) I’m ready to take it further - that is, I’d like to have the server running on its own hardware.
At this point, I’d just be running a music server, but I know I’ll want to add more services.
The first would be something like Google Drive - I’m working with a couple of other people on business plans and I’d love to self-host our files and the software (like LibreOffice) to edit them.
I’m comfortable with the software side and I’m finding lots of options, especially in this community.
The hardware side… I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by all the options and I don’t know enough to judge the search results.
Any recommendations for hardware or links to guides would be appreciated.
A simple way to ensure your selfhosting is easy to manage is to get a NAS for storage and then other device(s) for compute. For your current plans I think you’d get far with a Synology DS224+ (or DS423+ if you want more disk slots).
Then when the NAS starts to be not enough you can add an extra device for compute (a mini pc or whatever you want) and let that device use the NAS as a storage.
Oh and budget to buy at least one large USB Drive to use as a backup, even if your NAS runs a redundant RAID.