Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
I use a quartz64 from pine. Back when it came out it was beefier than the rpi4. With the 5 that has now changed but it still is a great little machine.
My instance runs on it aswell as my other webservices (A Homepage, cgit instance and a small blog). Handles everything really well with the 8GiB of RAM.
Setup is a bit of a pain, especially because I had the urge to run gentoo on it. Compile times are actually acceptable.
It costs 80 bucks, which is really acceptable.
Edit: Forgot to mention energy efficiancy, ARM is unbeaten by x86 in that department. People on here recommend old PCs a lot, which, depending on your local energy prices could quiet quickly void the savings made by buying it. Also it has a SATA port, which requires some tinkering with the Devicetree to get running but allowed me to use an old 1TB SSD i had in the house.
The Quartz64 is good but to slow to do anything to complicated. You can pickup minipcs for the same price that will have way more performance but will still draw only a few watts.