If you want a no-code solution, I recently created a homepage using GrapesJS (for free). I’m hosting it on Cloudflare Pages (for free). The whole setup was dead simple and almost completely free, I’m only paying for the domain.

EDIT: oops, that isn’t technically self-hosted…but GrapesJS is a very cool tool for building a simple HTML website. Just make it looks like you want and it’ll spit out all the files you need for hosting wherever your heart desires. Caddy, GitHub, whatever.

If your budget is $150, then you need to look for used options on eBay. Look for Dell Optiplex or Lenovo ThinkCentre towers. You will not find specs that good in your price range. But maybe you can get a decent CPU and save money to upgrade your RAM later.

MAYBE you’ll get lucky and find an old Dell server on eBay. Sometimes IT guys will sell their company’s old server for a profit. But I personally wouldn’t buy one of those, the monthly electricity costs are stupid.

It’s pretty easy to do this with Cloudflare Tunnels. You can set them up to use a Google account for SSO. Downside of course is that you’re reliant on Google and CF.

Lol no seriously, what’s your goal here? Self-hosting a server seems entirely unnecessary.

If you want to host an RSS server, FreshRSS is easy to set up if you know how to do Docker stuff. Then, you could connect it to a podcast app on your phone. But all that seems very complicated when you could just install AntennaPod (which is open source), subscribe to a podcast’s official RSS feed, and turn on notifications for that podcast. Adding an RSS server between your listening device and the original RSS server is unnecessary IMO, unless you have a use case that I’m not understanding.

Why do you need to self-host a dedicated server? Just put AntennaPod on your phone.

They’ve had some security breaches, like most companies. If you’re feeling paranoid, do some reading on nginx vulnerabilities.

Exposing your home servers to the Internet is always risky. There is no 100% safe way to do it.

but only for game servers

Why? I use tunnels for everything, all sorts of apps included. They’re easy to set up, and reliable.

Tailscale is a good solution, though. I use that as well.

If it’s just for personal use, Tailscale is dead simple. But it doesn’t use your domain; it assigns permanent Tailscale IPs to your nodes. And once you’re connected, it allows you to use your local IPs.

If you want a domain to point to your stuff, I found CloudFlare Tunnels to be very easy to set up. I use it for services that I want to share with others, like Overseerr.

You’re talking about remotely editing a file. That means you’ll need remote access to the fileserver where it lives. The common way to do this would be with a network fileshare, but there are many options.

If you want to access the file from OUTSIDE your home network, you need a VPN or something similar. The simplest option is probably Tailscale. Just install it on your server and on your remote device, and boom, both are always magically on the same virtual network.

Okay got it, so you compared the highest possible TDP on a Pi with the average/idle TDP on a desktop, and you’re acting like that’s a fair comparison. Thanks for clearing that up!

Lmao did you just compare the highest possible power consumption on a Pi with the lowest possible consumption on a desktop PC?

So it costs more up front, and it uses more electricity which costs more in the long term.

I don’t need all the extra Pi accessories, I already have cables and chargers and SD cards. So for me, the price of a Pi is just the price of a Pi.

Fast.com (that’s Netflix’s speed test) also tests loaded latency, which is basically what you’re talking about.

Honestly I haven’t used Proxmox, but I assume they can share storage without having to set it up like a network drive? If not, SMB would work.

If you go with TrueNAS, you’re stuck with TrueNAS/Docker. If you go ProxMox, you can theoretically do…anything. But of course that comes with some added complexity.

OP, this is probably your cheapest option. KVMs are NOT cheap, so the $264 dollar price tag on this pre-built one is actually pretty low. If you’re handy with electronics, you can build one yourself for a little over $100. I did it with a Raspberry Pi 4, following this guide: https://github.com/pikvm/pikvm#diy-getting-started

Read the documentation.

“Generally speaking Gatekeeper needs to sit between your LAN network and the internet. It can either completely replace the router provided by ISP, or sit between the ISP router and your LAN network.”

Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.

Or, see if you can get an old office PC for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Anything that’s around 5 years old (10 is pushing it) and has decent specs (maybe an i7 and 16GB of RAM) should work fine as a Minecraft and Plex server. Then you can get a cheap (ideally less than $200) graphics card and be good to go.

Bottom line, a “server” is just a PC that’s serving things. You don’t need enterprise grade hardware. If you’re new to hosting, I’d advise you to start cheap and then upgrade to better hardware in a few years when you KNOW what you need. No need to get something really nice and expensive right now.

To run Minecraft and Plex? That’s not really the ideal use case for a Synology…

I don’t see why it wouldn’t handle SyncThing, as long as you’re not syncing a lot of clients.

You could also get a cheap screen and use it for a news/weather/social feed.

Why not just use a separate switch and wireless AP for redundancy? Wi-Fi can be your backup if your wired switch goes down. Assuming your Dells have Wi-Fi cards, that is.