Hey, I want to dip my feet into self-hosting, but i find the hardware side of things very daunting. I want to self host a Minecraft server (shocking, i know), and i’ve actually done this before both on my own PC and through server hosts. I’d like to run a Plex server as well (Jellyfin is champ now it sounds like? So maybe that instead), but I imagine the Minecraft server is going to be the much more intensive side of things, so if it can handle that, plex/jellyfin will be no issue.
The issue is, I can’t seem to find good resources on the hardware side of building a server. I’m finding it very difficult to “map out” what I need, I don’t want to skimp out and end up with something much less powerful than what I need, but i also don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on something extremely overkill. I looked through the sidebar, but it seems to mostly cover the software side of things. Are there any good resources on this?
I used to run a Minecraft server with PaperMC on an RPi4, and I would only give the java environment 2G of RAM. It never crashed except when I overloaded it with plugins. The same Pi was also hosting Pihole and Ubiquiti UNMS. As long as you aren’t planning on hosting hundreds of players at the same time, you should be fine with whatever (and assuming you’re doing this at home on residential internet, your network would be the bottleneck anyway). I do recommend PaperMC, it improves the performance and stability of Minecraft and it’s a fork of Spigot so it’s compatible with most plugins.
Also /u/ShellMonkey is correct about used server hardware. You can pick up a Dell PowerEdge for about $200.