Selfhosted

It's not absolutely shit, it's a Thinkpad t440s with an i7 and 8gigs of RAM and a completely broken trackpad that I ordered to use as a PC when my desktop wasn't working in 2018. Started with a bare server OS then quickly realized the value of virtualization and deployed Proxmox on it in 2019. Have been using it as a modest little server ever since. But I realize it's now 10 years old. And it might be my server for another 5 years, or more if it can manage it.

In the host OS I tweaked some value to ensure the battery never charges over 80%. And while I don't know exactly how much electricity it consumes on idle, I believe it's not too much. Works great for what I want. The most significant issue is some error message that I can't remember the text of that would pop up, I think related to the NIC. I guess Linux and the NIC in this laptop have/had some kind of mutual misunderstanding.

I had a old Acer SFF desktop machine (circa 2009) with an AMD Athlon II 435 X3 (equivalent to the Intel Core i3-560) with a 95W TDP, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 2 1TB hard drives running in RAID 0 (both HDDs had over 30k hours by the time I put it in). The clunker consumed 50W at idle. I planned on running it into the ground so I could finally send it off to a computer recycler without guilt.

I thought it was nearing death anyways, since the power button only worked if the computer was flipped upside down. I have no idea why this was the case, the computer would keep running normally afterwards once turned right side up.

The thing would not die. I used it as a dummy machine to run one-off scripts I wrote, a seedbox that would seed new Linux ISOs as it was released (genuinely, it was RAID0 and I wouldn't have downloaded anything useful), a Tor Relay and at one point, a script to just endlessly download Linux ISOs overnight to measure bandwidth over the Chinanet backbone.

It was a terrible machine by 2023, but I found I used it the most because it was my playground for all the dumb things that I wouldn't subject my regular home production environments to. Finally recycled it last year, after 5 years of use, when it became apparent it wasn't going to die and far better USFF 1L Tiny PC machines (i5-6500T CPUs) were going on eBay for $60. The power usage and wasted heat of an ancient 95W TDP CPU just couldn't justify its continued operation.

I was for a while. Hosted a LOT of stuff on an i5-4690K overclocked to hell and back. It did its job great until I replaced it.

Now my servers don't lag anymore.

EDIT: CPU usage was almost always at max. I was just redlining that thing for ~3 years. Cooling was a beefy Noctua air cooler so it stayed at ~60 C. An absolute power house.

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.

I'm sure a lot of people's self hosting journey started on junk hardware... "try it out", followed by "oh this is cool" followed by "omg I could do this, that and that" followed by dumping that hand-me-down garbage hardware you were using for something new and shiny specifically for the server.

My unRAID journey was this exactly. I now have a 12 hot/swap bay rack mounted case, with a Ryzan 9 multi core, ECC ram, but it started out with my 'old' PC with a few old/small HDDs

You can do quite a bit with 4GB RAM. A lot of people use VPSes with 4GB (or less) RAM for web hosting, small database servers, backups, etc. Big providers like DigitalOcean tend to have 1GB RAM in their lowest plans.

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".

Got all my docker containers on an i3-4130T. It's fine.

My NAS is on an embedded Xeon that at this point is close to a decade old and one of my proxmox boxes is on an Intel 6500t. I'm not really running anything on any really low spec machines anymore, though earlyish in the pandemic I was running boinc with the Open Pandemics project on 4 raspberry pis.

3x Intel NUC 6th gen i5 (2 cores) 32gb RAM. Proxmox cluster with ceph.

I just ignored the limitation and tried with a single sodim of 32gb once (out of a laptop) and it worked fine, but just backed to 2x16gb dimms since the limit was still 2core of CPU. Lol.

Running that cluster 7 or so years now since I bought them new.

I suggest only running off shit tier since three nodes gives redundancy and enough performance. I've run entire proof of concepts for clients off them. Dual domain controllers and FC Rd gateway broker session hosts fxlogic etc. Back when Ms only just bought that tech. Meanwhile my home "ARR" just plugs on in docker containers. Even my opnsense router is virtual running on them. Just get a proper managed switch and take in the internet onto a vlan into the guest vm on a separate virtual NIC.

Point is, it's still capable today.

All my stuff is running on a 6-year-old Synology D918+ that has a Celeron J3455 (4-core 1.5 GHz) but upgraded to 16 GB RAM.

Funny enough my router is far more powerful, it's a Core i3-8100T, but I was picking out of the ThinkCentre Tiny options and was paranoid about the performance needed on a 10 Gbit internet connection

kind of.. a "AMD GX-420GI SOC: quad-core APU" the one with no L3 Cache, in an Thin Client and 8Gb Ram. old Laptop ssd for Storage (128GB) Nextcloud is usable but not fast.

edit: the Best thing: its 100% Fanless