Enterprise level hardware costs a lot, is noisy and needs a dedicated server room, old laptops cost nothing.
your hardware ain’t shit until it’s a first gen core2duo in a random Dell office PC and 2gb of memory that you specifically only use just because it’s a cheaper way to get x86 when you can’t use your raspberry pi.
Also they lie most of the time and it may technically run fine on more memory, especially if it’s older when dimm capacities were a lot lower than they can be now. It just won’t be “supported”.
I run a local LLM on my gaming computer thats like a decade old now with an old 1070ti 8GB VRAM card. It does a good job running mistral small 22B at 3t/s which I think is pretty good. But any tech enthusiast into LLMs look at those numbers and probably wonder how I can stand such a slow token speed. I look at their multi card data center racks with 5x 4090s and wonder how the hell they can afford it.
4 gigs of RAM is enough to host many singular projects - your own backup server or VPN for instance. It’s only if you want to do many things simultaneously that things get slow.
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N…not quite…
My home server runs on an old desktop PC, bought at a discounter. But as we have bought several identical ones, we have both parts to upgrade them (RAM!) as well as organ donors for everything else.
I’m self-hosting in a 500GB HDD, 2 cores AMD A6, 8GB RAM thinkcentre (access for LAN only) that I got very cheap.
It could be better, I’m going to buy a new computer for personal use and I’m the only one in my family who uses the hosted services, so upgrades will come later 😴
Odd, I have a Celeron J3455 which according to Intel only supports 8GB, yet I run it with 16 GB
Same here in a Synology DS918+. It seems like the official Intel support numbers can be a bit pessimistic (maybe the higher density sticks/chips just didn’t exist back when the chip was certified?)
I started my self hosting journey on a Dell all-in-one PC with 4 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, and Intel Pentium, running Proxmox, Nextcloud, and I think Home Assistant. I upgraded it eventually, now I’m on a build with Ryzen 3600, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, and 4x4 TB HDD
My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.
I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.
Why didn’t you post this before I bought the RAM?!
Not anymore. My main self-hosting server is an i7 5960x with 32GB of ECC RAM, RTX 4060, 1TB SATA SSD, and 6x6TB 7200RPM drives.
I did used to host some services on like a $5 or $10 a month VPS, and then eventually a $40 a month dedi, though.
Yeah, not here either. I’m now at a point where I keep wanting to replace my last host thats limited to 16GB. All the others - at least the ones I care about RAM on - all support 64GB or more now.
64GB would be a nice amount of memory to have. I’ve been okay with 32GB so far thankfully.
What do you use the 4060 for?
I use it for Plex/Jellyfin, it’s the cheapest NVIDIA GPU that supports both AV1 encoding and decoding, even though Plex doesn’t support AV1 yet IIRC it’s still more futureproof that way. I picked it up for like around $200 on a sale, it was well worth it IMO.
2012 Mac Mini with a fucked NIC because I man handled it putting in a SSD. Those things are tight inside!
Those things are tight inside!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Had to buy a special two pronged tool to get her out!
Lol, I used to have an 08 Mac mini and that required a razor blade and putty knives to open. I got pretty good at it after separately upgrading the RAM adding an SSD and swapping out the cpu for the most powerful option that Apple didn’t even offer
When I used to work at the “Fruit Stand” I never had to repair those white back Mini’s thankfully, but I do remember the putty knives being around. The unibody iMac was the worse, had to pizza cutter the whole LCD off the frame to replace anything, then glue it back on!
Lol by the time I actually needed to upgrade from that mini, all the fruit stand stuff wasn’t really upgradable anymore. It was really frustrating, so I jumped ship to Windows.
Those iMac screens seemed so fiddley to remove just to get access to the drives. Why won’t they just bolt them in instead of using glue! (I know why, but I still don’t like it)
I used to selfhost on a core 2 duo thinkpad R60i. It had a broken fan so I had to hide it into a storage room otherwise it would wake up people from sleep during the night making weird noises. It was pretty damn slow. Even opening proxmox UI in the remotely took time. KrISS feed worked pretty well tho.
I have since upgraded to… well, nothing. The fan is KO now and the laptop won’t boot. It’s a shame because not having access to radicale is making my life more difficult than it should be. I use CalDAV from disroot.org but it would be nice to share a calendar with my family too.
What hardware are you using where the cpu says you are limited to 4gb?
Even a 25 year old Pentium 4 supports 8GB.
Maybe an Atom?
Yep. Intel atom D525
Maybe. But it would need to be an Atom from 15 years ago. Anything newer does 32 GB.
Of course motherboards don’t support it but that’s not the cpu’s fault.
My guess is an x86 32bit machine
