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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[–] slackj_87@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Used business desktop from eBay is what I run. With what you want to run, you'll be fine with even 10 year old hardware. I'm running a dozen services on 10 year old basic business hardware with no issues. With regards to media though: if you're not getting a dedicated GPU, get a Intel 7xxx or later CPU so you have Quick sync for transcoding.

I run Ubuntu Server on one, proxmox on another. Both have their pros and cons. Depends on what you want to do. If your plan is just to run everything in containers (and it should be), Ubuntu with docker is plenty. If you plan on playing around with VMs, go proxmox.

As for what services, here's a huge list of different self hostable services grouped by category/function: https://awesome-selfhosted.net/ Most have a demo site or a quick install guide for docker that makes it easy to try stuff out.

Avoid selfhosted email if you can... it's a whole different animal.

[–] luckyeddy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago

Great advice and I would like to add to this, if you need something easier to run for VMs, go Fedora Server rather than proxmox. If you find your use case needs a bit more complexity, then go proxmox.

I personally found that proxmox was an overkill for what I wanted out of my (old laptop) server.