Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Your currently stated requirements would be fulfilled by anything with a general-purpose CPU made in the last decade and 2-4GB RAM. You could use almost literally anything that looks like a computer and isn't ancient.
You're going to need to go into more detail to get any advice worth following here.
What home servers differ most in is storage capacity, compute power and of course cost.
Most home server services aren't very heavy. I have like 8 of them running on my home server and it idles with next to no CPU utilisation.
For me, I can only see myself needing ~dozens of TiB and don't forsee needing any services that require significant compute.
My home server is an 4 core 2.2GHz Intel J4105 single-board computer (mATX) in a super cheap small PC tower case that has space for a handful of hard drives. I'd estimate something on this order is more than enough for 90% of people's home server needs. Unless you have specific needs where you know it'll need significant compute power, it's likely enough for you too.
It needs about 10-20W at idle which is about 30-60€ per year in energy costs.
I've already seen pre-built NAS with fancy hot-swap bays recommended here (without even asking what you even need of it, great). I think those are generally a waste of money because you easily can build a low-power PC for super cheap yourself and you don't need to swap drives all that often in practice. The 1-2 times per decade where you actually need to do anything to your hard drives, you can open a panel, unplug two cables and unscrew 4 screws; it's not that hard.
Someone will likely also recommend buying some old server but those are loud and draw so much power that you could buy multiple low power PCs every year for the electricity cost alone. Oh and did I mention they're loud?
A DIY solution like your home server is great. I'm just adverse to recommending it to someone who need to ask such an open ended question here. A premade NAS is a lot more plug n play.
Personally I went with an ITX build where I run everything in a Debian KVM/qemu host, including my fedora workstation as a vm with vfio passthrough of a usb controller and the dgpu. It was a lot of fun setting it up, but nothing I'd recommend for someone needing advice for their first homelab.
I agree with your assessment of old servers, way too power hungry for what you get.
I feel like that has more to do with the complexity of solving your use-case in software rather than anything to do with the hardware. It'd be just as hard on a pre-built NAS as on a DIY build; though perhaps even worse on the pre-built due to shitty OS software.
Agreed - my use-case would be "24/7 server + gaming vm on demand with my monitor and peripherals connected to the gaming vm" and I doubt that is what most are going for.
The reason I mentioned my own build is because I consider putting all the components together to be a step up in complexity too, when compared to going pre-built. For someone who is comfortable with building their own PC I would definitely recommend doing that, the ability to tailor the hw to your needs is so much greater. :)
I think I'd split that into two machines; a low power 24/7 server and a on-demand gaming machine. Performance and power savings don't go well together; high performance machines usually have quite high idle power consumption.
It'd also be more resilient; if you mess up your server, it won't take your gaming machine with it and vice versa.
I'd recommend that to someone who doesn't know how to build a PC because everyone should learn how to do it and doing it for the first time with low-cost and/or used hardware won't cause a great financial loss should you mess up.