Anything you need to buy is more expensive than anything you already have.

Especially if youre worried about power costs.

Reuse wha you have, replace when you need to.

Let’s put it this way, I’m hosting about 30 Docker containers including a full Servarr stack, Jellyfin, and Mastodon on an old Dell workstation intended for office work.

I started with an old and half-broken laptop. Keyboard war busted.

Worked fine for months, then choosed to upgrade because I started hosting jellyfin and the laptop was unable to transcode on the fly…

You are fine with whatever hardware you have lying around… You can always grow later

Keep an eye for energy consumption tough… Too old stuff might be less efficient running 24/7 depending on your kW/h cost.

Any normal computer can become a “server”, its all based on the software.
Most enterprise server hardware is expensive because its designed around demanding workloads where uptime and redundancy is important. For a goober wanting to start a Minecraft and Jellyfin server, any old PC will work.
For home labbers office PC’s is the best way to do it. I have two machines right now that are repurposed office machines. They usually work well as office machines generally focus on having a decent CPU and plenty of memory without wasting money on a high end GPU, and can be had used for very cheap (or even free if you make friends that work in IT). And unless you’re running a lot of game servers or want a 4k streaming box, even a mediocre PC from 2012 is powerful enough to do a lot of stuff on.

Heck yeah! Old desktops or laptops are how most of us got started.

Things to consider:

• Power- this will be on 24/7 probably. That adds up
• Speed- not just CPU, but RAM, disk access and network interface can limit how much data you want to move.
• Noise- fans can suck (pun intended). Laptops tend to run quieter

I’m sort of looking to upgrade and N100 or N150’s are looking good. Jellyfin can do transcoding so that takes a little grunt. This box would work well for me. It’s not a storage solution, but can run docker and a handful of services.

I just got a great Jellyfin+*arr setup running off of an old PC. Let me know if you need a hand

If you aren’t worried about power costs, yes, go for it.

I calculated the energy cost of running a 100w PC 24/7 for 2 years, covers the cost of a new mini PC + 2 years of its own energy cost. So I just bought a NUC which draws 7-8W. Less noisy too. Laptops usually draw less than desktops though so you may be good there.

I’m running my Proxmox VE on a small asus mini pc with embedded cpu. It can’t even match a 5 year old i3 and I’m having no issues.

Running mainly containers and small projects

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.

This was maybe 2-3ish years ago;

I started with a raspberry pi 4 bundle from Amazon, played around with the Linux filesystem, bash shell, APT package manager and just kept reinstalling the headless Debian 12 OS if I believed to have bricked it beyond repair.

Eventually learned about the Docker Engine & Docker Compose and that essentially gave access to a plethora of software I would’ve have never have used before.

The raspberry pi 4 started to show sluggishness as I started piling more and more services on it so, Instead of buying traditional server grade hardware I liked the small form factor of the Pi so I opted for a 13th gen Asus Nuc with an 12 core i7.

Everything runs beautifully now and I even run Debian 12 on my desktop as well!

I love the vibe in this thread/community. You all seem like real cool cats. I appreciate that.

Do it. Jump in. Just start with whatever you can assemble.
It’s a great way to keep your room warm.

Old PC’s and especially laptops (make sure to consider removing the battery though) make great homeservers. You can run dozens of services on old hardware.

Absolutely yes. It’s better to use an old PC for a home server, because upgrades are cheaper, parts are easier to find, troubleshooting is generally easier, they’re usually more energy efficient than an older dedicated server, and you’re saving an old pc from becoming e-waste.

That being said, what you want to run on it determines how old/cheap of a PC could work for you.

Jellyfin works best when you can do hardware encoding, and these days that means throwing an ARC A310 in there and calling it a day. If you have a new enough processor, you don’t even need the graphics card.

Mastodon is pretty disk heavy, but if you’ve got a nice hard disk to put the Minio server on and an SSD for the db, you’re golden. That’s how I run https://port87.social/. It’s running on an old 6th gen Intel i7. The PC I built in 2015 (with a few upgrades).

CPU intensive servers like Minecraft are where you start to run into problems with older hardware. If it’s just you on there, a 10 year old CPU is fine, but if you’ve got a few friends, the server may start to struggle to keep up. I had to move my server off that same system I talked about above, because Minecraft was pegging the CPU a lot. But a 5 year old CPU would be fine for that. (Assuming that the 10 year old and 5 year old CPUs were both top tier CPUs when they were new. Like i7, i9, Ryzen 7, Ryzen 9. A five year old i3 would still struggle.)

Basically unless you’re trying to run AI models on it, cheap hardware is fantastic for personal servers.

My home media server is an old nuc mini pc i5 16Gb RAM with attached usb storage running on a Linux distro, runs Jellyfin and a few other applications for the household.

In short yes, an old pc will work fine.