I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
My home media server is an old nuc mini pc i5 16Gb RAM with attached usb storage running on a Linux distro, runs Jellyfin and a few other applications for the household.
In short yes, an old pc will work fine.
These also have the advantage of being nice and quiet, which if you are going to have it in your house rather than a hot garage or whatever can be nice.
I bought a NAS, later realised that it supported Plex and Jellyfin but it was often too slow to do the transcoding. I still use it for storage but there were no real upgrade options. It was cheaper to get an old NUC, rather than replace the NAS with a high spec one to be able to run Jellyfin properly.
I’m doing a very similar thing with an old Dell thin client. I did inherit a large server from a company that was upgrading, but I’ve been thinking about downsizing a lot lately so now I use a few small computers on a 10 inch rack.
the best server is one that you already have