this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
19 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40261 readers
820 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I am not looking to onboard thousands of users or host large communities, just my own and some family and close friends' accounts. I don't currently have a scalable homeserver setup (just a local Home Assistant instance on a Pi) and don't have the space to put an old desktop running Proxmox on a cable.

I was browsing single-board computers and the Pine64 (2GB RAM) looks like a good deal. It seems more powerful than similarly priced Raspberry Pis (3B 1GB). Is it good for running a small Lemmy instance on?

EDIT: Thanks for the advice all, just bought an 8th gen i3 NUC (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) to play around with Proxmox and VMs. Going to start off with migrating Home Assistant and then set up a Lemmy instance, and perhaps a static website too.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I am a big fan of "mini desktop" computers for this sort of task (my lemmy instance is running on one). You can usually pick them up used/refurbished for pretty cheap with decent specs: i5 or better processors, upgradeable RAM (SO-DIMM), M.2 or 2.5in SSD. They are quite small, and relatively low power. I have a few in my homelab, and one acting as my media-center PC in my living room.

Image to give an idea of size, appx. 7 inches square by 1 inch tall

[–] F04118F@feddit.nl 8 points 1 year ago

You're right, just having one mini-pc with Proxmox and being able scale VMs between applications is a lot better than a collection of sbc's. I will look at the used market.

[–] codus@leby.dev 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I second this. I used to use Raspberry Pis but one mini PC can do so much more and isn’t much more expensive.

[–] terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.li 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, maybe I was rough on them but I killed like 2 Pis in a year running OpenELEC/LibreELEC (even with heatsinks) before I bought an Nvidia Shield (which was great until Google forced terrible things onto it and Nvidia seemingly stopped supporting it). I grabbed one out of my homelab and I've just been running straight Ubuntu on it for about 6 months at this point and wouldn't dream of going back.

[–] dan@upvote.au 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've got a HP ProDesk G5 SSF I bought from eBay for $200, and love it. It's got a Core i5-9500 which is more than enough power for me. I run a few things on it, like Blue Iris (in a Windows Server 2022 VM) for my security cameras, Home Assistant, Zigbee2mqtt, Node-Red, VictoriaMetrics, and a bunch of others.

Having said that... Depending on how much power it uses and how much power costs in your area, it can sometimes end up cheaper to use a VPS, and you get better enterprise-grade hardware and internet connections. You can get a good VPS for less than $50/year especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on Lowendtalk.com.