I’m looking at various single board computers ( think raspberry pi) to host a server on. Namely for hosting media, an email, and perhaps a web site/fediverse instance/blog/forum on.
I’m under an assumption that a SBC and some hard drives could handle this on the hardware side. Am I totally off the mark? And what kind of os and other soft wear should I consider using?
spoiler
With the price of a lot of the SBC’s you will probably be better of going for something like as dell 3050 with a gen7 or above in it. I picked up a gen7 dell 3050 with 4Gb and a 500Gb disk for £50. Threw in a 1tb nvme a 120gb ssd and a spare 500GB ssd I had. Installed Debian with KDE , then i set up the drive shares via sftp, installed Docker and setup the various docker containers such as freshrss, kodi, Firefox ,Pi-Hole etc.
What ever route you go have fun starting you journey in the world of self hosting.
You’re not off the mark. It’s a great idea for a low traffic server that doesn’t guzzle electricity.
I suggest an SBC with 4GB RAM (or more) and 4 cores, though you could probably get by with a bit less. If you use a Raspberry Pi, make it version 4. If you’re going to use mechanical hard drives (good value for bulk storage) consider a board with native SATA or PCIe for lower interrupt overhead and better SMART access than a USB bridge would provide.
Debian is a great server OS. There are derivative distributions (e.g. Armbian & Raspbian) for boards that aren’t supported by mainline Debian.
Software will depend on your needs as a user and your preferences/experience as an admin. If you end up wanting something like Docker, you might want to try Podman instead, as it’s less resource-hungry.
Also, check out the self-hosting forums. You’re likely to find more people doing the same sort of thing.
That’s what I started on! Honestly, RAM is likely to be your biggest bottle neck. Pretty much anything will be doable though, with enough swap and a fast drive. Just don’t expect great performance.
There are small form factor PCs that you can get used and they will have more power, IO, better compatibility, and be cheaper than a raspberry pi.
There are YouTube videos about it and they are not much bigger than the size of a pi.
Their initial cost might be more, but if you get a case and sd card and micro-hdmi adapter you can totally get a better system.
I had an old MacBook Pro laying around so I put docker on it for fun.
it’s currently running an apache web server for me (with php) and has been rock solid. (I used to use mamp.)
I also run homebridge for my Apple Home on the mbp. homebridge uses brew (from brew.sh) for install/dependencies/etc.