Server Hardware?

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.
- I have something 10 years old for jellyfin only, (other light stuff too, not important) and it handles it fine. No hardware acceleration but the CPU can keep up for just me and 1 friend using it. I got it for 50 bucks on eBay and it rocks. I don't know about Minecraft servers though.
  Edit: It didn't come with drives. Don't ever trust old drives.
  
  Might I suggest Server Part Deals for drives? Excellent track record and very responsive. They are my goto for refurbished enterprise drives and have never let me down.
  
  It depends on whether or not you're transcoding, how many users you have, and your resolution. If you're just direct streaming 720p/1080p content to a couple of people then even a Raspberry Pi is fine. But if you're sending transcoded 4K streams to several people simultaneously, you need some horsepower.
- Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.
  Seconded. A few years ago I upgraded my CPU, which also required me to swap the motherboard and RAM. The old Mobo / CPU / RAM combo was sitting around in my closet. I just bought a decent case, power supply, and a few hard drives, and bam. Instant server.
  As far as graphics card, I would go with something cheaper unless you have a specific reason. If your CPU has a built in graphics processor, that's probably good enough. My CPU didn't, so I had to throw a $30 card in.

Modded minecraft servers are heavily dependent on single threaded performance. For more vanilla servers paper helps a lot. For forge I highly recommend trying mohist. It isn't compatible with all forge mods but it works well enough that you can just replace the server jar in many modpacks and see a large performance boost.
The biggest thing that slows down mc servers in my experience is world gen. Pre generating the world and adding a world border can help a lot.
I've not done a larger scale fabric server so I can't offer much advice in optimizing it but the client speed ups available through fabric look very impressive.
If you are running a server without world borders or with a lot of simultaneous players I'd look in depth on what ssd you're saving the world to. You want dram cache, random write speeds are way more important than sequential. If you can find an Intel optane for cheap they are pretty amazing. The ssd is less important than your cpu and having enough ram to run the server.
Generally an older gaming pc is better than an older server. Again you are targeting single threaded performance. If you are purchasing hardware it might make more sense to go with lower end new hardware than higher end old hardware. It's all about trade offs for your use case and budget. For a long time I just used my main pc to play games and host servers (ram is cheaper than another pc) but I tinker too much to keep good 'server' uptime.
Transcoding can get pretty taxing on a system but any semi modern quad core can handle a few 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Plus you can use a gpu for transcoding. The nice thing is it scales with core count pretty well so older server or workstation hardware works well.
- The only thing I'd add to this is that the people who make Paper Minecraft are working on Folia, a multi threaded server. It's probably worth looking into if you're starting from scratch :)
  
  Not terribly useful for anything less than a lot of players
- Fabric has some amazing open source projects dedicated to performance.
  Idk if any multithread it yet but its my current go to for low end systems

Don't get server hardware, use regular desktop/laptop machines as they'll be more than enough for you. Server hardware is way more expensive and won't be of any advantage. If you're looking to buy you can even get very good 9-10th gen Intel CPUs and motherboards that are perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don't want because they aren't good to play the latest games. This hardware is also way more power efficient and sometimes even more powerful than any server hardware that you might get for the same price. Get this hardware for cheap and enjoy.
- I've got enterprise level hardware, rack moubtable all that jazz.
  Between the cost of power, and the heat it generates (which uses more AC and thus power) its not feasible to run it.
  I'm looking into clustering some raspberry pis for a more power (and heat) efficient hardware as my next project. Barely scratched the surface of research though.
  So hey, if anyone has any tips or links, it would be much appreciated.
  
  Just out today, but probably overpriced: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/20/mixtile-cluster-box-supports-four-rockchip-rk3588-sbcs-connected-over-pcie/
  Why not get a few HP / Dell mini computers and cluster them? Small, nice and power efficient (because there are models with "mobile" CPUs).

Hardware wise, you just need a good PC. One thing to note is that graphics are almost irrelevant for servers. In your case, it would help to have AV1 encoding, so you could go with a $110 Intel A380 or A310.
The most important thing is RAM. The more server applications you start putting on there, the more RAM you’ll need. 16GB is fine for what you need right now, but make sure your mobo has two extra slots so you can up it to 32 if needed.
Storage, it’s really up to you. If you want everything on an NVMe, great! If you want everything in a RAID array, expensive, but great! Using mdadm for RAID arrays is fairly easy, just a lot of reading. Make sure you have enough SATA ports to support all the disks you need if you want that.
CPU, avoid ones with integrated graphics to save cost. Unless you’re buying one that does AV1 encoding, then you don’t need the A380.

I just use my old gaming PC, GPU and all. I self host quite a few services on it and I have yet to find something that puts it into high usage.

You don't need to buy server hardware, although it is nice. Depending on where you live you might be able to buy some decent second hand server hardware.
If it was me, I would buy new desktop hardware. Here is a fairly decent server that will do almost anything: Go for around 16 or 24 core CPU with high Ghz per core. 64GB or 128GB DDR5 RAM. Your most important factor will be storage speed. Go with NVMe drives. You have some choices here. JBOD: One or more independent M.2 key drives. Software RAID: Use your CPU to manage the RAID configuration. Hardware RAID: Use a RAID controller HBA card to manage the RAID (faster but single point of failure). Use RAID 1 for data protection (can lose one drive and still have all your data), RAID 0 (double the speed of your drives), RAID 10 (best of both but needs double the drives). Choose a motherboard that suits your choices.
Things to take into account: If you go with a RAID controller card, make sure that the PCIe lanes it uses can take the full speed of your RAID configuration or you might be bottlenecked there. Choosing an Intel or AMD CPU doesn't make much difference. If you are not good with linux distros and don't want a learning curve, stick with something like Ubuntu LTS 22.04 server. You most likely won't need any graphics card, but it depends what you want to do.
You can run a minecraft server on an old laptop, so these specs might be overkill, I just put what I would get and it will do almost anything you want to do with it. An 8 core CPU, 16GB RAM, with 1 NVMe drive will also be capable of all your described needs just fine.

I don't have any better hardware suggestions than you've already been given, but I would recommend avoiding Plex.
I get problems with it pretty much every day. Usually it's the client stuttering and crashing, but I often get the client connecting to the server, but not getting a list of media back.
I've bought a lifetime licence, but I'm looking into switching to Jellyfin because it's so frustrating.

Honestly for what you’re trying to accomplish, any PC built in the past 10 years would suffice.
I’d say the bigger issue would be what server operating system you’d want to run. Personally I use UnRaid and I love it, all of the apps you mention and more are available as premade docker templates in the Community Apps plugin. I’ve tried Windows and FreeNas before but I find UnRaid just so user friendly and reliable.

Media servers can be pretty demanding particularly when doing on the fly transcoding. Look for refurbished servers, big companies routinely toss perfectly good hardware as part of product lifecycle management. A favorite of mine is called 'techmikeny' although their site and search is pretty janky.
I/O performance needs to be considered along with the number of processing threads which really comes into play if you have a lot of virtual machines/containers running. Less than $1000 upfront and you can get well more than you think you need, and have space to improve. I'd say focus on CPU first, it's easy to add memory and storage later if you buy a big enough box to have extra slots open, but adding CPUs is more of a pain.
Electricity and noise should be a thought too. My largest box is using about 240 watts right now and if you go with actual rack servers they tend to be loud with a half dozen fans running at 6000 rpm or so. If you can stash it somewhere out of your living space all the better.
- Yes exactly. QuickSync has been on Intel CPUs (i5 and up) since Sandy Bridge. But I’ve heard that only since 4th gen has it been out.
  I would recommend a used SFF PC for docker, and a separate NAS like a Qnap for file storage.
  
  The power is only needed for transcoding. Multiple 4k streams should be little more than directly serving up the files to the client machine (like your TV) which consumes very few resources. You should avoid transcoding 4k down to 1080p or 720p by either avoiding 4k content, grabbing only stuff that is directly compatible, or having duplicate copies of stuff in 4k and 1080p so that the 1080p file gets transcoded if needed.
  Many of us have separate 4k libraries on our servers to prevent any possibility of transcoding it (like for remote streams when you don't have the upload speed to stream 4k directly). Like for example i have about a dozen family members using my server remotely but I don't share my 4k libraries with them since the best upload I can get with Comcast is 12Mbps. In the Plex settings I have everyone limited to 3-4Mbps so that I can handle 3-4 people watching remotely at once which leads to these streams getting transcoded down to 720p.
  
  In a transient way I might say rather than constantly. I use Emby and when something is streaming to a Roku in a format that's not native it ends up using something around 80% of the allocated power. I don't use the throttling option though so it's actually working well ahead of the stream and finishes up a full movie in a few minutes rather than going along in realtime.
  So yeah it could be heavily mitigated but I'd rather just have it done rather than hoping it's smart enough plan ahead.

I used to run a Minecraft server with PaperMC on an RPi4, and I would only give the java environment 2G of RAM. It never crashed except when I overloaded it with plugins. The same Pi was also hosting Pihole and Ubiquiti UNMS. As long as you aren't planning on hosting hundreds of players at the same time, you should be fine with whatever (and assuming you're doing this at home on residential internet, your network would be the bottleneck anyway). I do recommend PaperMC, it improves the performance and stability of Minecraft and it's a fork of Spigot so it's compatible with most plugins.
Also /u/ShellMonkey is correct about used server hardware. You can pick up a Dell PowerEdge for about $200.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe	Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PSU	Power Supply Unit
Plex	Brand of media server package
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage

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I've gone with Unraid and consumer level hardware (intel i3 12100 and 16gb of standard ddr4 ram) the only "server hardware" I have, is an LSI HBA card that's in IT mode so I can connect more HDDs.
I'm even used SMR drives in my array, just use a good CMR drive for parity and the biggest SSD you can get for your cache drive and you will be good to go.

I started on a raspberry pi and would highly recommend. Great for tons of things to self host.
It’ll run Plex no problem, just forget transcoding.
- Hosting a minecraft server on a Pi is ambitious.
  I tried it. Not great.

As someone who is also looking at building a server for different things then you( mainly nextcloud and a few other self hosted services). if you don't need more then 2tb of storage look into a used HP mini office PC.
They are cheap at less then £200 for an older model or even sub £100
They are a lot more powerful then an SBC like a raspberry pi but without being an electricity consumption monster like a lot of servers
Some have a 60W PSU so they are dirt cheap to run
Newer ones have a 2.5 SATA slot and a M.2 slot( including the 60W model I'm looking at getting used). So you can have dual drives for a fast main drive and a backup drive or RAID depending on how you set it up
They are small and don't take up much room in your house like a raspberry pi
If you need more space and it doesn't have to be super fast you could get a USB NAS for it
So overall they are a really good option if you want something small and you don't have a ton of money for hardware or electricity but a raspberry pi doesn't fulfil your performance needs.

I use old thinkcentre machines, they're cheap and are powerful enough for decent servers. I have them loaded with 16gb of RAM and 2x265gb NVME each for mirroring. They work wonderfully.
- And some even come with discrete gpu

There are a few things I'd consider:
How many users are going to be on the MC server? MC is pretty notorious for eating RAM, and since most of my home server adventures often includes multiple VMs, I would look for something with at least 32 gb of ram.
for plex (I'm guessing similar is going to be the case for Jellyfin) how many users do you expect to support concurrently, and how good are you at downloading in formats that the clients support direct play for? Most remote plex users are going to require transcoding because of bandwidth limits, but if you have direct play for most of your local clients or have a good upload and don't have to transcode 3+ streams at a time, you're probably fine with just about anything from the last 10 years in terms of CPU.
also re: plex, do you have any idea in terms of storage requirements? Again, if you're just getting started < 10 tb of storage in mind, you can get by with most computers.
Anyway, to give you an idea, I run both of these and quite a few other things besides on a Dell R710 I bought like 4 years ago and never really have any issue.
My suggestion would be grab basically any old computer laying around or hit up eBay for some ~$100-$200 used server (be careful about 1u's or rack mounts in general if noise is a concern, you can get normal tower-case servers as well) and start by running your services on that. That's probably just about what all of us have done at some point. Honestly, your needs are pretty slim unless you're talking about hosting those services for hundreds of people, but if you're just hosting for you and a few friends or immediate family, pretty much any any computer will do.
I wanted to keep things very budget conscious, so I have the r710 paired with a rackable 3016 jbod bay. The r710 and the rackable were both about $200, and then I had to buy an HBA card to connect them, so another $90 there. The r710 has 64 gb of ram and I think dual Xeons plus 8 2.5" slots. The rackable is 16 3.5" slots, so what this means is I basically don't have to decommission drives until they die. I run unRAID on the server, which also means that I can easily get a decent level of protection for drive failure, and I don't have to worry about matching up drives and all that. I put a couple of cheap SSDs in the 710 for cache drives and to run things I wanted to be a little more performant (MC server, though tbh I never really had an issue running it on spinning disks) and this setup has been more or less rock solid for about 5 years now hosting these services for about 10 people.

This is a repost from my suggestion some weeks ago:
I went for the ASRock J5040 board, 16gb ram a 500gb m.2 as system using a PCI adapter , 2x4tb ironwolf as ZFS mirror pool, 350 W power supply all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro alltogether.
Runs proxmox as hypervisor for VM or Container. 6 LXC running motioneye, plex, pyload with openvpn, syncthing, rclone cloud backup and openbookshelf.
Typical power usage is around 20W
That said it could also run on PicoPSU

IF you're going to run your self-hosted server to run a minecraft server, get a webclient front-end. Even though it's not FOSS and therefore a no-no with most lemmy users, AMP from Cube Coders is a great option, it starts a flat $10 fee for a permanent license. It has some fantastic features for remote backup among supporting other games.
However, if you're a bit concerned about that there is Pterodactyl, which I've heard good things about, but I went with AMP because it supports other game servers like GMOD.

Lots of choices for sure. I haven't built a PC in years but I'd start with looking at the requirements for the Minecraft & Jellyfin server, maybe shoot a bit higher to future-proof the build, then browse PC part picker builds to find combos that have worked well for others?
Best of luck to you.

1ct KAMRUI Mini PC Intel N5105 Windows 11 Pro 8GB RAM 256GB SSD WIFI6 4K Dual LAN (proxmox arbiter and also this will run your pfsense/opensense firewall vm/appliance)
2ct UM350 Mini PC 16 GB RAM 512 GB PCIe SSD AMD Ryzen 5 3550H Mini Computers (both of these will be the prox 2 and prox3 worker nodes)
Buffalo TS5410DN1604 TeraStation (NAS)
1ct Cisco Catalyst WS-C3650-24PS-S 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch TESTED
All of that together with the Buy it now options are around $1000 USD total with shipping. That Buffalo NAS will need 3.5" drives. So add that to the cost.
- That is a complete overkill. You don't need a cluster of Proxmox nodes for personal hosting. And you certainly don't need a 24-port switch.
  
  So my 3 r720xds in a proxmox cluster with CEPH would definitely be too much then

It really kinda depends on what type of Minecraft server you're running. I was running Plex and Minecraft on unRaid with like 16gigs of ram and an i3 8100 and it was fine until I started doing more intense moded Minecraft. The iGPU in Intel processors can handle transcoding really well so it's a pretty good all in one solution. I imagine if you're going to heavily modded Minecraft you could probably get away with a current gen i5 or maybe even i3 if you're on a budget. Looks like the i3 13100 has hyper threading and my old 8100 didn't. Not sure how big of a difference it would make.

I have something to read for you :
My Request
It is a request of me from earlier this year. The boards I mention in the opening post are no good choice. But the Asrock J500x or J5040 (the one I picked in the end) are. For my needs it is enough of everything. Even if some users here think the celerons are "heaters that can do math" ^^
On the other hand, the cpu is soldered to the board. No upgrade without switching the board either... Even the SODIMM ram needs to be replaced when switching away from an itx-board...
On the other hand, it is less energy consuming than using an old desktop cpu etc.
The pico-psu is just sweet 😊
Edit: fixed link

Decent older servers (e.g., Dell Poweredge) can be had off of Craigslist/FB Marketplace pretty cheaply (~$300-$400).
- They're cheap but they're loud, hot and use a lot of energy. So if those are an important consideration you might be better off with modern hardware
  
  OP should skip this option entirely for their use case. Regular old consumer hardware is more than adequate.

- Same for me

just get a synology?
- Great as a NAS but pretty low specced for hosting many more demanding applications for the cost.
  I run Plex on mine but was faster on a raspberry pi 3 lol.
  For file management, backups, etc. It’s stellar.
- Way too expensive, and not what they need.
- To run Minecraft and Plex? That's not really the ideal use case for a Synology.....
- I used to host Plex on a Synology. It's okay, but it struggles when skipping around. And downloads for offline viewing would fail almost always. I have had a much better experience since switching to my old gaming PC with a GPU.