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

  • dan@upvote.auEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    QuickSync is more than sufficient for most users. It can handle several concurrent 4K transcode. It’s also not that common to have to transcode, unless you stream your media content when away from home a lot, and have poor upload speed.

    If going Intel, there’s different models of Intel iGPU, so I’d go for the lowest-end GPU that has the higher end iGPU. My home server is a few years old and has an Intel Core i5 13500. The difference between the 13400 and 13500 looks small on paper, but the 13400 only has UHD Graphics 730 while the 13500 had UHD Graphics 770 which can handle double the number of concurrent transcodes.

    Intel iGPUs also support SR-IOV which lets you share one iGPU across multiple VMs. For example, if you have a Plex server on the host Linux system, and Blue Iris in a Windows Server VM, and both need to use hardware transcoding.

    I’ve heard AMD’s onboard graphics are pretty good these days, but I haven’t tried AMD CPUs on a server.