this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Selfhosted

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noob questions seeking non-noob answers (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by FEIN@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I'm so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?

My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:

  • 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
  • 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
  • 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
  • 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing..? or nextcloud?)
  • potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
  • potential email hosting (distant future)

anyways with that all said i have a few questions:

  • what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
  • any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer

edit: im willing to learn anything cli-related, i already daily drive linux on my laptop and code in nvim if that provides any sort of reassurance lol

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[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

What's your budget?

If you want to make it enterprise, buy a Dell or HP server (maybe Fujitsu if you're not in the US, or Lenovo, Cisco, or IBM if you get a good deal and are okay with it being uncommon and weird, i.e. can be hard to work with and not much community support).

If you don't care about that and want to DIY, get a case with room for expansion and start picking parts. If you want redundancy, get 2x6tb or bigger (because you'll immediately start filling it) and set them in a RAID or zfs mirror. That way if one drive dies you can limp along with the other until the replacement comes in.

I always recommend not hosting internet-facing services yourself if you can avoid it, because it presents an opportunity for compromise. I self-host a lot of things, but my personal site is on a Namecheap shared host and my email is still Gmail.