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Help me build a home server

Help me build a home server with a budget of €100/$109 (I live in Denmark)

I am thinking of buying it used how much ram who'd i need and what CPU

What I want to run on it

Nextcloud

RSS feed

transmission (if possible for the budget)

Maybe a few other small services

Photoprism (if possible for the budget)

Is this realistic for my budget?

Edit: Thanks alot for your really helpful comments

25 comments

  • The Raspberry Pi 5 might be good enough for your needs. The 8GB costs a bit less than 100€ without any accessories at the danish reseller, so it fits in your budget. I don't know if it's good enough for all your services.

  • For that low of a budget I'd go look for used desktops to run - which is exactly what I did to get started .

    Then raspberry pis

    If you can go up further I've really enjoyed the beelink computers as tiny servers

  • The budget is way too low imo.

    You could repurpose an old workstation, bought dirt cheap on eBay if you are lucky, but even then you'll have to get yourself an HDD, maybe multiple of them if you want to have data redundancy.

    For anything new your best bet is a 2 bay ready made NAS, but you'll have to invest around 300€ for the cheapest one.

    • It is entirely possible to start with a 2-bay drive rack (not a caddy, we want something without the connections) and then run the SATA out the back of the computer to the drives. It’s a compromise for this low a budget, but it’s not a major sacrifice.

      https://www.ebay.com/itm/115485675524

  • Everything you want is definitely possible for the budget.

    I used an old I5 laptop with 4GB of RAM for a year or two. If you need a lot of storage, an old HDD will be fine usually. A raspberry pi 4 or 5 will be slower, but would still work, but if Norway prices are anything like belgium, an old I7 laptop sips power and will save money in electric costs

    A few tips:

    • Run nextcloud all-in-one or spend some time optimizing nextcloud. It will help performance a lot
    • Unless you are a serious photographer, use Immich, 100%. Immich is a google photos replacement that has a bunch of good user features like accounts and good security and sharing that photoprism just doesn't. Photoprism is really geared towards professional photographers.
    • transmission + wireguard container for a VPN is the way to go ...
    • radarr/sonarr/lidarr & prowlarr are good to use with transmission

  • I used to have old ThinkStation as a home server. Even older ones like S20 I have couple of laying around is still pretty capable system (I'm typing this on one) and as they've been CAD workstations and things like that when they were new many have 12+GB of RAM already. I got mine for free troguh a work contact, but they should be available via ebay or (preferably) your local version of it for pretty cheap.

    Then you just need new drives and their prices have dropped too. 100€ is a bit of a stretch, but if you can get a whole computer from someone in the industry it should be possible. I have a few systems laying around I could get rid of for a case of beer or something, but shipping alone from here would eat up majority of your budget (if anyone is interested in x3550 m3 throw me a message, located in Finland, I might remember the model wrong but that's roughly in the ballpark).

    Other than thinkstations I'd say you'll want a xeon CPU with at least 4 hyperthread cores, 16GB RAM and all the drives your budget has left. SSD for a boot drive(s) is nice to have, but spinning rust will get you there eventually.

    Many rack mounted servers only accept SAS-drives which are a bit more expensive. Tower mounts generally use SATA so you can just throw in whatever you have laying around. The main concern is amount of RAM available. For older systems it might be a bit difficult to find suitable components, so more you have already in place the better. For VM server I think 16GB or above is fine for learning and it might be possible to shoehorn most of the stuff in even with 8GB. Performance will definetly take a hit with less RAM, but with that budget some compromises are necessary.

    So, in short, with that budget it might be possible if you have a friend who has access to discarded workstations or happen to stumble in a good deal with local companies. It'll require some compromises and/or actively hunting for parts and with old hardware there's always possibility of failure so plan accordingly.

25 comments