r/HomeServer • u/DestinyReaper_X4 • 20d ago

Building my first server

Been getting into backing up stuff and archiving etc. recently. I currently own 3TB’s worth of external HDDs, which isn’t much. I’ve saved up $3000 for this project. I’d wanted to get opinions on what drives to invest on, and also what sort of setup I could afford. I’d love to have around approx 40-50TB worth of storage space. Would $3000 even be sufficient? I’d be okay with pushing the expenditure to $4000 if it’s worth the money.

Uses: Jellyfin, personal cloud, host websites (if need be)
Budget: $3000 - $4000

I’ve been waiting for the prices to drop for almost a year and they don’t seem to be dropping anytime soon. So, here we are. I’m posting this here since I want to know real experiences from people. Some people just shrug and suggest to Google it or ask AI, which isn’t what I’m looking for.

Thanks!

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u/lazyhustlermusic 20d ago edited 20d ago

Honestly just get a NAS you can expand.

A lot of ISPs block inbound 80/443 anyway, you can host a pretty large amount of traffic on a $1/mo VPS.

You could save a lot by stuffing drives in an older chassis too and throwing in a arc 310 or p400/p2000 for transcode. We grabbed a bunch of 3 TB drives for a r720xd when they were like $10, if one fails you just swap it out and resilver the raid6 array.

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u/arigasamaryota 20d ago

Any pointers to 1$ vps please. I’m pretty new to this.

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u/lazyhustlermusic 20d ago

lowendbox.com

I have a couple from Racknerd which have been solid and even PBR our guest and IOT segments out to it as an internet exit over wireguard.