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 :)
After years of messing around with cheap and unreliable hardware and complicated setups, I settled to a very stable and simple setup: one huge Dell server with a lot of spare SAS bays and plenty empty memory slots, driven by Proxmox. Within it only 4 VMs: One for pfSense, one for Home Assistant, one for Docker, and one for Ispconfig, as I host for some friends. I ended up using Truenas as it was such a pain to maintain and totally useless for my use case. Proxmox is good enough to run a simple ZFS Nas if you don’t need to manage dozens of shares and users. It’s now so hassle free that I start to become inclined to brake something just for the sake of it.
Which model Dell?
Buying few-year old enterprise gear can be a really cost-effective way to get a ton of power and expandability. But the noise, footprint, and power requirements seem pretty niche, even for homelab/selfhost people.
But I’m curious if you’re talking about a full-depth rack system like I’m assuming, or something else.
Personally, I switched to a handful of very small-footprint systems (mostly NUC/SFF PCs, and some laptops). And use cheap jbod enclosures when I need to add external storage.
It’s a R730XD. It draws 168W idle with 128GB of 2400Mhz, and 8 x 3.5" spinning drives. I started with small desktop computers, but I ended up compromising about everything: ram, disks, cards. Everything was braking one after an other, mostly because heat I would think. I (and my family) was constantly annoyed by the outages, so now I invested in a proper rack in my garage. It’s sometimes noisy, it’s somewhat power hungry, but god… Professional hardware is so comfortable to work with. iDRAC, ipmi, very good temperature management, lot of room for upgrades, reliability, I wouldn’t go back to the nightmare of half-assed computer. I now run everything I can think of so smoothly that I rarely get complains from anyone. It’s not only from the hardware side to be honest. Using traefik has been a massive improvement to ease my reverse proxying. Finally getting rid of Truenas a huge relief. And switching from a hardcore 20 year long Gentoo user to a Portainer’s noob a clever move to finally get some time to use the services I host instead of messing around with hundreds of config files.
By the way, I do not understand the huge paranoia about facing services to the internet. I’m happy to share my mail, websites, jellyfin, cloud services and what else to everyone interested. In the more than 30 years I’m online, I never been hacked in anyway. I might be lucky.
