First Home Server Setup Has No Clear Starting Point
179 posts across 13 communities in the last 30 days; 78% from r/selfhosted.
“Maybe Unraid ? [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“(im not very brilliant so please bear with me also engllish is not my first language sorry if the prose feels weird) what would be the most confortable and less overhead aproach to deploying constantly new sites to a server with docker currently i was following a tutorial (…”
“Hello all! I just picked up this EliteDesk 800 G5 and a 2TB hard drive from my local surplus store. I usually run Jellyfin off my main PC, but I wanted to free up some space and also got tired of having to turn on my desktop every time I wanted to watch a movie or show. I’m new…”
Individuals are eager to self-host various services (media, storage, utilities) but lack the technical expertise and experience to do so reliably. They're exploring platforms like Proxmox and Docker, seeking guidance on setup, maintenance, and security, often starting with limited hardware resources.
SOURCES (60)
“So, I have 3 devices 1 Old Dell PC with 8Gb ram - Using it as a system for testing multiple things (doesn’t matter if it breaks and I can start fresh) currently has ProxMox with Ubuntu VM. 2 RPi4 running as an infrastructure services…”
“I’m going to run some tests using the recommendations I was given, along with a mini Debian server and CasaOS—let’s see how that goes. [re: you tube 24/7]”
“I run NixOS on my desktop and Nix Darwin on my laptop, and am thinking of migrating my homelab to NixOS too. Curious if there are any good references, tools, or guides out there? submitted by /u/claytercek [link] [comments]”
“Yes, yes I do- good catch! [re: Setting up my own family cloud drive for the first time - Nextcloud or Opencloud?]”
“That's what I'm doing at the moment, with a 4th gen i5 Thinkcentre. It's been fine for a couple devices. I'm almost entirely 720/1080 for space effiiciency. [re: New to self hosting]”
“I have pi-hole set up, do I also set up adguard home and technitium as well? or just 1 of those 3? [re: I am new to self hosting and just want to know whats out there for me to discover]”
“Maybe Unraid ? [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“I switch to NixOS. Lot of upfront work, but overall feels like less maintenance so far [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“I went from K3s cluster to baremetal compose stack, but it was mostly because I didn't have the time to fiddle. Now I'm virtualizing everything in Proxmox as IAC and will eventually bring back Kubernetes again. The stable selfhosted part is for the critical services for me - Docmost, Kaneo, Frigate. But I started this whole ordeal with learning being the main focus, so it makes no sense simplifying. [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“Just build. I usually put singular roles per server. On your home pc setup hyper v. Setup a DC static IP and dns first. Get familiar with OUs, GPOs etc. Setup a windows 11 VM join it to the domain, point the dns to that server IP. If you have 365 create a sync to get familiar there as well. Intune connector etc. Then setup other roles print server, file server, etc. I have scripts for alot of what I do now. Get familiar with powershell and use AI to help with the code. Dont go wild and say do ev”
“Not sure if I'll get shunned here, but.. I have a RustDesk setup. I have a Proxmox LXC as the main host/node, and a few work clients that I connect to from home (very small business). Maybe a dozen clients, all passwords are very secure. Is RustDesk's private/public key plus password safe enough? [re: A quick reminder on why exposing RDP (Port 3389) directly to the internet is still a terrible idea]”
“I only host things which are actually useful, which is why all I run is PiHole, NAS, and a Wireguard VPN. [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“At the tail-end of simplifying my homelab setup to reduce the mental overhead. All hosts (vm's) migrated to nixos (dendritic pattern). I used claude and enabled the nixos mcp. Its built out all the documentation and a TUI for provisioning. Everything is declarative, I don't bother ssh'ing into each host now. My existing ARR stack has been completely streamlined, optimised by claude. With everything declared in one repo, makes it incredibly easy for AI to help diagnose problems and ad”
“I replaced my old servers with one MacMini, uses far less power, yet way more powerful [re: Anyone else slowly moving away from complicated self-hosted setups?]”
“Hello, My Pi4 just died. I have a mini pc that is sitting away for few months and i plan to use it for HA. The miniPC is a 512Gb, 16 DDR, with intel 7 procesor. Also i have a windows licence on it. It was never used, …”
“Hey everyone! I'm a solo developer working on my own digital product, and I'm looking for an affordable but reliable server for production deployment . Since I'm managing the project and infrastructure myself, I want to keep hosting costs as low as possible without compromising too much on performance or reliability. Here are my requirements: CPU: 4 vCPUs / cores RAM: 8 GB Storage: 50–60 GB SSD or NVMe Usage: Production workloads, not just local development or testing Budget: As econ”
“(im not very brilliant so please bear with me also engllish is not my first language sorry if the prose feels weird) what would be the most confortable and less overhead aproach to deploying constantly new sites to a server with docker currently i was following a tutorial ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZoxuBiL9 ) which uses docker swarm with treafik and lets encrypt to handle a lot of the annoying stuff (load balancing, https certificate, ports exposing and binding to the domain names) so f”
“And I must also add that docker containers are not actually that heavy.I have a 10 year old, dual core, 8gb DDR3 laptop serving somewhere around 20 dockers for different kinds of services and it runs just fine. Even 2 clients transcoding some media usually works ok.PS: It is not currently on, more due to it being a clunky machine with structural problems then the hardware itself. I should get it a 3d printed desktop case”
“So, we've just bought a house and now have a proper garage. I am looking at putting a much bigger server cabinet in the garage with a fibre cable into the house to my office. I have a Dell Opitplex 3070 with an i5 9500 but I want to expand the home lab to something like 3x Lenovo Thinkcentre. 1) Low power consumption 2) To learn High Availability 3)To expand what I'm running. What are some cost friendly computers I could buy off ebay to match the hardware across all 3 for Proxmox HA? I a”
“I use mobaXterm, allows RDP, ash, telnet, vnc browser windows etc, it has a free version which allows a certain number of machines, or a paid version, been pretty good for me, nice being able to have it handle authentication too [re: New project for a free RDP Manager]”
“> I prefer running services natively when possible, but will containerize complex services or those with many dependencies. Love: a service that’s a single Go binary. A service that only comes as a Docker compose file and wants to run MySQL, Redis, and three other containers? I’m already looking for an alternative.Ok, I respect your opinion, but remember that there are poor souls like me out there that actually love the opposite.”
“Hello all! I just picked up this EliteDesk 800 G5 and a 2TB hard drive from my local surplus store. I usually run Jellyfin off my main PC, but I wanted to free up some space and also got tired of having to turn on my desktop every time I wanted to watch a movie or show. I’m new to having a dedicated server, so I was wondering if you guys had any advice on how I should set this up or what else I could eventually use it for. Also, this was kind of an impulse buy, so I’m curious if I actually got a”
Rule #2 [re: YourDrive: selfhost-able drive for your media]
“My box was fine for like a year. Vaultwarden, Uptime Kuma, Paperless and a couple of small Node things, all in Docker on a 4GB VPS. As soon as I added Immich last weekend, my machine started swapping hard the second the ML container kicked in. Load average hit 9 and Vaultwarden timed out on my phone. I know Immich is the hungry one but now I'm wondering if I just undersized everything. What does your stack actually sit at in docker stats? Do you split the heavy stuff onto its own box or just”
“Hi all, I've done a lot of research and am still unsure about what direction to take for my data backup system and was wondering if you had any word of wisdom based on your diverse experiences. I'm a beginner amateur photographer. I've been accumulating a many more photos over the last year since practicing more frequently and consistently. At the moment I'm actually trying to consolidate all my photos from over the years (from phones, previous cameras) and securely back them up”
“Thanks for the detailed reply. One thing I might have forgot to mention is that my SAN has barely 1TB freespace. The two production servers is at 50% usage except storage, they have barely 500GB storage. For your proposed plan I need to use SAN space, which I'm not sure if we I can do since it is already formatted for VMWare storage. One other option is to use our DR server which is a DAS and has enough storage to hold the environment, but that will take more steps, first wipe and format DR”
“Hi, some context: I have a homelab at home where I install various apps that me and my family use. i.g. immich for photos, a shared RSS reader, fitness tracker, etc.. we connect through tailscale. and I use docker containers to host these. My dad is pretty tech savvy, and he wants to make money to recoup the server costs by turning it into a small family-run VPS where developers can get ssh access to develop and host their apps for a monthly fee. Obviously for security reason, these apps need to”
“I will remember this always. Thanks! [re: How to safely Create Local Computer act like VPS for alternatives of Cloud VPS server.]”
“Its seems interesting about the security plan you gived. I would learn it. Thanks! [re: How to safely Create Local Computer act like VPS for alternatives of Cloud VPS server.]”
“Aight i would learn it [re: How to safely Create Local Computer act like VPS for alternatives of Cloud VPS server.]”
“I just want to have a home server for my own movie streaming and music streaming service. This is my initial goal for my home server. Then i will expand it for storage server for storing photos and videos. I have Lenovo think centre mini pc spec: i5 7th gen 8 gb ddr4 ram 2400mhz 256gb ssd and 1 TB Hdd And one more thing i want to access it form outside my local network. GUIDE ME TO BUILD MY FIRST HOME SERVER…. submitted by /u/NoobMaster_2905 [link] [comments]”
“Mine was an Eggdrop for sharing music. [re: My first server was a free PC from school. Now I have 52 services. What did you start with ?]”
“I honestly don't remember where i found it, but it was a list I found yes, I added the ubuntu ntp servers to the bottom though here's the list I use: https://pastebin.com/uLejH0sW i add this to the "misc.dnsmasq_lines" settings in pihole when you go to all settings > misc [re: Which small self-hosted service has stayed useful after the novelty wore off?]”
“The funny thing is, there's only SO MUCH a home server can do. [re: Which small self-hosted service has stayed useful after the novelty wore off?]”
“Same. It is so nice being able to login to all my stuff from one place. This was like discovering MRemote like 15 years ago. [re: Termix v26.10.1 - Plugins (official + community) self-hosted server management (SSH, remote desktop, file management, docker, host metrics, etc.)]”
“Hello, I want to setup a home server with several services like Jellyfin, Pihole, VPN service and Truenas. I have 2 PC's available and am wondering what would be better to manage setup. On device one I'm hosting all the services and on device two I want to run Truenas. So my question is, are there benefits on running Truenas on Proxmox vs bare metal? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/2life_gamer [link] [comments]”
“I'm currently running a server with OpenMediaVault, on which I also run several docker containers for Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and Frigate among other things. It's running on an AM4 platform -- Ryzen 4750G with 32GB of RAM. For Frigate, I'm using a Google Coral USB. The Coral has been abandoned for a while, and just recently the Debian repository for it stopped working, which set off alarm bells in my head. So now I'm looking to add a GPU to use as a detector for Frigate and als”
“That ~12 MB footprint per node is really appealing when you're running on old hardware or low-memory VPS. Most monitoring stacks eat up more RAM than the actual services I'm trying to keep alive. Curious what the CPU load looks like under the hood. Does the daemon do its own metric collection at a fixed interval or is it more event-driven? I'd be a little nervous about disk writes piling up over 30 days if it's logging every second to a sqlite db or something similar. The fleet j”
“Hey r/selfhosted , I've been running a few small Linux servers and got tired of the two usual options: a full Prometheus + Grafana stack that's heavier than the stuff it's watching, or a hosted service that sends my metrics to someone else's cloud. So I built Trinetra. What it is: • One small Go daemon per Linux server (~12 MB) • Live dashboards and 30 days of history, stored locally • Alerts to Telegram, Slack, Discord, email, ntfy or a webhook. It's meant to stay quie”
“I've repurposed an old Acer Aspire 1410-8414 laptop running Debian with LXQt as a home server to learn Linux, networking, and self-hosting. The specs are 32-bit architecture, 2 GB RAM, and previously reported 128 GB storage. So far, I've set up a password-protected Samba share with custom file and directory masks, configured UFW firewall rules, mapped the share on Windows using net use , monitored disk activity with watch and iotop , and set up Tailscale for secure remote access. My goal”
“For my self-hosted solution, I am running TrueNAS on a Dell Optiplex 7040, which has a CD DVD burner. I use the drive to rip CD media, but was interested in whether there are any containers / apps that would let me make use of the burner. I am thinking files such as photos, mp3s, documents, etc. Or perhaps there is something that would let me burn a already created ISO file? Does anything like this exist? submitted by /u/proudgeekdad [link] [comments]”
“Its been so long i cant even remember. Im gonna deploy jf again after i renew my home server.. [re: Which small self-hosted service has stayed useful after the novelty wore off?]”
“I’ve been lurking here for a bit and I’m ready to dive into the world of self-hosting, but I’m a bit overwhelmed by the hardware choices. I don't have much experience with server configurations yet, so I’m looking for some "starting point" advice. I’m trying to figure out what the minimum requirements are that I should look for to have a smooth experience. Specifically: Processor: What’s the baseline? (e.g., Is an Intel i3/i5 enough, or do I need something beefier?) RAM: Is 8GB eno”
“https://preview.redd.it/yw9yblg6i2vh1.png?width=3723&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8c371b7bfc1b7e56ea3d4ff3d287de9d46041db I converted my old gaming PC to a home server that's been running 24/7 for a few weeks. Here's what I've self hosted: A minecraft server for me and my friends, very good performance even with 10+ players online at once and plugins. (Medium CPU priority, 4GB ram maximum) Portainer: For no reason (Low CPU priority) PiHole: Blocking ads on my home network and”
“Hello all! Looking to get into homelabing and starting to hoard data (mainly just movies for Jellyfin). I am looking here to see if anyone has a nice DAS set up, or if i should just get a NAS and get some WD Reds for the movies/shows. I currently have an i5 8600k with 32gb of ram (ddr4) from an old gaming rig. Using it now as a gaming server but i want to just add to its usage. (Its on windows 11 but i wouldn’t mind having either linux or WSL for windows to have linux). I heard linux is the way”
“i'm relatively new to this, so i'm looking for something user-intuitive software-wise with the intended goal being like 12 players total with maybe like half being on simultaneously being peak traffic the catch is i'd need it to support java, cracked clients and bedrock simultaneously with hopes of being able to have skins on any and all advice is apprecieated <3 submitted by /u/minecraftrubyblock [link] [comments]”
“Hey people! I'm new to self hosting stuff on my own PC (So I only want recommendations that I can make use of when my PC is open) I use Podman and currently I'm self hosting Glance, a Starlight Wiki, Karakeep, and ReClip, I want to know about tools that improved YOUR life! I'm on Linux if that's important. submitted by /u/Fyoncle [link] [comments]”
“I grew up with computers but admittedly never really could understand their potential beyond playing games and using apps or surfing the web. Today I've created my own home server using my ISP router and Jellyfin connected to my digital media collection. I'm interested in Moonlight/Sunlight to game on the couch instead of sitting at the server computer and it got me thinking: What is your dream use case? What sorts of things beyond media playback can self hosting provide that I can't”
“I knew hardware wouldnt be cheap. But i thought its rather CPU/GPU/RAM. I thought i will buy some NAS-System for backup important local stuff. But the barebone nas system cost like 400€ and each HDD (i thought about 4x4tb in raid5) will cost me 200€. thats way to much for just some hobby project of mine. Any idea how i can reduce the cost? Are there reliable refurbish products? How do i find those? My mini pcs all got just one 1 SATA port so i cannt use those. I got an hold mainboard from my gam”
“I just build that beafy NAS and it will run pure nixos. The separation of concerns comes for free in the form of nix derivations and for the services you mention you don't need to set cpu and ram limits for each just spec it to have enough headroom. Running pure nixos minimizes overhead and makes everything fast; KISS [re: Anyone using NixOS to selfhost?]”
“Doesn't have to be one or the other, I'm still using OneDrive for backups because I'm paying for it via M365 anyway. [re: Why Selfhost?]”
“What free cloud VM are you using, if I may ask? [re: Anyone considering just moving to wireguard access instead of reverse proxy?]”
“I keep up with that project for some time now and my current setup ist ansible first from my control node (laptop/desktop) to set up my netcup Webserver with selfhosted forgejo combined with my database server with selfhosted Postgres database and also my oracle free tier VPs which is my forgejo runner. The rest ist git ops and ci/cd. Every night all my servers get a check for critical updates. Compose files I also push in repo and link the docker compose step in each playbook. I am still on bac”
“For that, I would need to know your setup, And I'm not sure how the mods here will react. Using these services may be illegal in some countries. Such a rack also varies depending on the home setup. To use such a service, you should also have some knowledge, so do some more research and if necessary, chatgpt can probably help you better. [re: My homepage dashboard]”
“How I run 28 self-hosted services on a N100 Mini PC with 16 GB RAM. By being a little picky with the projects you choose, you can stretch your hardware a long way - which, given the price of RAM, is more important than ever. submitted by /u/langelgjm [link] [comments]”
“Due to my profound mistrust of The Man TM , I've decided it's about time to build up my own home network. I used to do all my projects on one laptop, but I broke the OS a lot. Now, my website is hosted on a Raspberry Pi, so it never goes down without my say-so, and I just got my hands back onto an old laptop of mine that I had on semi-permanent loan to a friend. After helping him upgrade, I have a second PC to test and tinker on, before porting things over to my main PC. It will also be”
“Yeah, the single binary is a huge plus—makes updates and backups dead simple. PiHole's fine, but AGH just gets out of your way for basic blocking. [re: Question about pi-hole vs adguard home vs technetium]”
“I found an old computer yesterday it a dell optiPlex 755 I have no idea what to do with it [re: My first server was a free PC from school. Now I have 52 services. What did you start with ?]”