In a few months, I will have the space and infrastructure to join the selfhost community. I’m trying to prepare, as I know it can be challenging, but I somehow ended up with more questions than answers.
For context, I want to run a server with torrents, media (plex, Jellyfin or something else entirely - I didn’t make a decision yet), photos(Emmich, if its stable, or something else), Rook, Paperless, Home Assistant, Frigate, Adguard Home… Possibly lots more. Also, I will need storage - I’m planning for 3x18tb drives to begin with, but will certainly be adding more later.
My initial intention was to set up a NAS in Silverstone CS382(or Jonsbo N3/N5, if they’re in a reasonable price). I heard good things about Unraid and it’s capabilities of running docker. On the other hand, I’m hearing hood things about Proxmox or NixOS with NAS software running in a VM, too - but for Unraid, it seems hacky. Maybe I should run NAS and a separate server? That’d be more costly and seems like more work on maintenance with no real benefit. Maybe I should go with TrueNAS in a VM? If I don’t do anything other than NAS, TrueNAS shouldn’t be that hard to set up, right?
I’m also wondering whether I should go with Intel for QuickSync, AMD and Arc graphics or something else entirely. I’ve read that AV1 is getting popular, is AMD getting more support there? I will buy Intel if it’s clearly the better option, but I’m team Red and would prefer AMD.
Also, could anyone with a non-technical SO tell me how do they find your selhosted things? I’ve read about Cloudflare Tunnels and Tailscale, which will be a breeze for me, but I gotta think about other users aswell.
That’s another concern for me - am I correct in thinking Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels are all I need to access the server remotely? I will probably set up a PiKVM or the Risc one aswell, can it be exposed aswell? I will have a dream machine from Ubiqiti, anything that needs to run to access the server I may run there. I’m not looking to set up anything more complicated like Wireguard - it’s too much.
For additional context, I’m a software developer, I know my way with Docker and the command line and I consider myself to be tech savvy, but I’m not looking to spend every weekend reading changelogs and doing manual updates. I want to have an upgrade path (that’s why Im not going with Synology for example), but I also don’t want to obsess over it. Money isn’t much of an issue, I can spare 1-2k$ on the build, not including the drives.
Any feedback and suggestions appreciated :)
Was there 6 months ago, I’ll just share what I did: OS: I went with Unraid because you can mix different sized HDDs without loosing space, just make sure the parity disc is same size or bigger as the biggest one with data. I backup everything with duplicacy to a stupid nas (wd mybook i got 2nd hand) and to an external hosting via ssh.
Most CPU is used for video transcoding so I went with a 12th gen i3 12100, it’s more than enough for my usage. Just don’t make the same error as I did… I really recommend a better cooler than the boxed one. It can get loud when unmanic starts to converting bigger videos to h265.
My normal PC is fully team red as it just works better on Linux for gaming but for nas, 12th gen Intel seems to be the way to go as far as my research shows.
I don’t use a gpu and the slot for it is used for a DELL perc h310 SAS controller in IT mode for more discs.
Most services are not exposed and I use wireguard to access my server remotely. Single docker services are exposed with nginx reverse proxy manager and dyndns, my domain is set to resolve to local IP addresses when at home or through vpn, this way I can always use the same hostnames with valid certificates. I use a simple bash script in a cron job to update my dns zone.
I have other hardware to play around and did work with proxmox and other solutions, but this NAS had to just work without lot of tinkering and I’m really happy with it.