1y ago

Looking for low power devices for selfhosting

Hi friends. I'm a newbie in self-hosting, though I've been managing (virtual) linux servers at work for a couple of years. I'm completely ignorant on the hardware choices out there, hopefully you can point me to the right direction.

Here are my requisites:

Low power consumption, I plan to have it connected 24/7 and I'm kinda concerned on how much it will impact the electricity bill
Ethernet port, preferably gigabit but whatever
Graphical performance is not important as I don't plan to connect it to any display. As long as I can ssh into it, I'm good.

Services I plan on installing, for starters:

casaOS
pi-hole, or equivalent
Home Assistant
Kitchen Owl (nice to have)
Paperless-ngx (nice to have)

I live in europe and my budget is around 80 euros or so. Thanks in advance!

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64 comments

As a point of reference regarding power consumption:
I've been running a desktop non-stop for the last ten years (built as a gaming rig) as a file/media server, so it's probably the worst thing you can run this way, power-wise. Has an 800 watt power supply, running windows.
I've done the math many times, costs me about $1/day in power at mostly idle.
Just presenting a worst-case example as a guideline.
I've recently spun up a Raspberry Pi Zero W for PiHole, DHCP, DNS, Tailscale, Joplin and Bitwarden. It's maximum power draw is TWO WATTS. Haha
Currently running a watt meter on the desktop, should have some decent actual numbers from it soon, but can't imagine idle is any less than 50 watts.
So there's two extremes. Don't be me (looks like you aren't!)
Edit: I wouldn't recommend the Zero W for this, it's underpowered. I'm already overloading it with just PiHole and Tailscale, honestly.
- Yeah same. I have several machines that whirrr all the time. The power cost and usage is fairly negligible. The real costs in the house are appliances. OP will save more energy by getting a more power efficient fridge or dishwasher than worry about a computer being on in the closet
- Throwing in my own data, I have a small server rack at home that runs a brocade icx4630 switch and dell r720, idles around 250w. My desktop setup, monitors, amp, computer itself etc idles around 200w.
  
  Oof. Maybe my power is worse than I thought!
  
  Adding my data as well:
  My server is diy desktop pc - mbo MSI Z270-A PRO with celeron G3930 and 16GB RAM, 3x SSD on 550W PSU, idles at 23W. After adding another 3.5" HDD consuption went up to 34W. 34W in Ctoatia is around 34€ a year.
  Some SFF PCs are at 10-15W. SBCs like rpi should be below 10 W, but dont think you can get anything new for 80€
- Pi Zero could be underpowered but the bigger pi's sound like a perfect match. I would recommend looking into a used pi 3 or 4, because the pi 5 is new and always out of stock (at least in europe) so you pay around 150$.
  
  Libre Computer "Le Potatoe" is a inexpensive solid performing SBC.

64 comments