I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
My current server runs 40ish docker containers and has 24TB of disk space in a ZFS array.
It is a 11 year old Intel chip and mobo that was my desktop once upon a time. I have been thinking about updating it simply because of power draw, but it works just fine.
I did add in PCI risor boards to get PCI 3.0 NVME drives in there.
It’s pretty common practice to upgrade your computer and turn your old one into a server. Then continue that cycle every upgrade.