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Comment by Xeoncross | Hacker News Reader

It depends on what direction you want take. You could purchase a $5/mo digital ocean server or a $5 raspberry pi and start by installing https://pi-hole.net, https://nextcloud.com, https://syncthing.net, https://www.plex.tv, or some other software to get the first (largest) thing you want resolved. Then move on from there and install the next package you need.

Ad blocking for your phone? VPN for work? Self hosted email? Retro gaming? Figure out what you want most and jump into that instead of trying to get everything all at once as it can be overwhelming to consider every system instead of taking one step at a time.

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Why is the self host advice to always buy a Raspberry Pi, use an old crappy computer you have lying around, etc?

I have a very beefy desktop for the first time in over a decade (maxed out Mac Studio) and I am wondering is there any real downside to having these services run on it?

You can certainly run these as background tasks on your existing daily driver, but you don't have to.

I've found a raspberrypi/orangepi to work just fine and it doesn't matter if the main computer is on, I'm upgrading to a new system, or traveling between work (laptops). It just sits in the closet and does it's thing using a tiny amount of electricity.

Mostly because you want a dedicated device to serve off of. If your desktop is always on it isn't that much different.

My desktop gets shut down, rebooted, crashed, wiped and reloaded, and otherwise abused as I get thoughts.

My home server has been the same (don't worry I run updates) for a couple years, chugging along, sipping about 1/4 the power my desktop would take.

In the beginning of your self hosting journey, the opposite might be true. You might want to try 300 things, and that's hard to do if you're trying to get work done on your desktop.

I have Pi's and old, beefy computers and what I really need is an "elastic personal cloud" where I can bring up the high-powered computer(s) online on demand[1]. I have WiFi-connected sockets and a python script than can turn them on or off, but no orchestration or global state.

1. My 12-year old, former top-of-the-line laptop is much faster than my 3rd-gen Pi when periodically ingesting and indexing JSON into a PostgeSQL db, I suspect slow IO and limited memory are to blame.

I have used wake on LAN sometimes for this too, but that was close enough for me, and I lost interest.

WoW (wake on wife), worked pretty well from the office, but I seem to get a little bit of latency and packet loss. Now I work from home, so I just get up and hit the power button on the more powerful machines.

My shock with compute power was when I got the Pi 4. It was faster than the AMD e350 I was using for backups except for disk IO. The E350 was not a powerful machine new, but I didn't realize how far we had come.

A USB 3 enclosure brought it to a level that was good enough the entire mini ITX build was pointless to keep around.

The downside is you might not want to leave your computer running all day and VM networking can be a pain if you want to access the services from other devices on your network.

A pi/old computer is a physical box you can put in a corner and you can be sure the physical network works if it is connected.

The only downside is, I believe, the electricity bill. The reason to use a rpi is that it has enough computational power to do many useful self-hosting tasks while consuming only a fraction of the power of a beefy computer.

Mac Studio idle is 11 W (max 115 W) compared to RPI 4 idling at 4 W (max 6 W).

It's reasonable to assume that the 115 W on a Mac Studio will never be hit on a workload that could be supported by a RPI...so you're looking at an extra $10-20/yr to operate the Mac Studio.

The biggest issue is just the upfront cost, since of course the Mac Studio is proportionally expensive to its capability.

Idle power consumption for Apple Silicon Mac is low despite it's workstation, it's outlier. Average Intel desktop consumes similar or a little more power for idle, that is acceptable IMO for flexibility and reuse. Maybe DIY PC consumes a bit more than average Dell desktop even if CPU is same. Average Intel workstation/server consumes much more than them so it's wasteful for almost idle server. So it depends on what is the previous PC.

Oh for sure, if you pick out a high consumption CPU then it'll be high for sure

Mostly energy usage. A raspi is going to use a lot less power than most crappy old computers and a hell of a lot less than your beefy desktop.

You could do it. But it's not a good fit. Workstations are more about customization and personalization. Servers are more about consistency, reproducibility, and reliability.

E.g. you can't restart your desktop while your roommate is watching a Plex movie. Or your VPN stops working because your roommate's cat walked on your keyboard while you were on vacation.

I had my home server on a pi and then an old laptop, and finally in a VM on my always-on Mac Mini. The hardware devices were nice for set-and-forget operation (especially the laptop, because the PSU acted as a UPS that kept it running during several power outages over the years).

I like the VM rather than running it directly on the Mac because it's trivial to copy the VM to another computer when I want to change hardware. Obviously, your services will be unavailable whenever the host machine restarts.

You may want your services to have good availability while being able to shut off and reboot your (likely power-hungry) desktop without concern.

Especially for DNS. Like, your system reboots for an OS update and now the rest of your the devices on your network have connectivity issues for an hour or so. Or you have a hardware issue and now you lack both the infra and the workstation so getting things up and running again becomes triply annoying.

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