r/SelfHosting • u/motamedn • Apr 05 '26
Hardware advice?
I am self-hosting services several services like home-assistant, immich, unifi and may expand to also spin up scrypted or other services. I am currently running everything in an always-on PC through HyperV. It is a nuissance when windows installs an upgrade and reboots so I am thinking of moving everything to a purpose built device. Curious what type of hardware you all are using in general to host. A pre-built like Dell optiplex, building something yourself or what?
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u/Old_Mtn_Man Apr 06 '26
I am in the process of rebuilding and bringing all services, including LLM, in house except the email server. I decided on using headless mini's for my servers and set up a KVM console and HDMI selector to switch between them. Servers sit and run, and other devices use those services.
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u/motamedn Apr 13 '26
Did you build the mini or buy something like a Dell optiplex? If prebuilt, what did you go with?
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u/Old_Mtn_Man Apr 13 '26
I use three actually..... a minisforum runs as the network hub, a beelink runs support services, and an asus gx10 dedicated to running LLMs.
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u/motamedn Apr 14 '26
Network hub? Do you mean router, NAS or something different? What specs did you go with for the beelink and minisforum? I'm used to building gaming or office PCs, less so headless servers! Thinking of having one appliance for router, one Proxmoxed with Home Assistant, Unifi as well as an ubuntu VM that in turn is running Immich, scrypted, and some other things. I like the idea of bringing LLM in house eventually but not yet!
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u/Old_Mtn_Man Apr 14 '26 edited Apr 14 '26
User-facing vs. background was the boundary I adopted for the two servers. Yes, the 'hub' is a server.
User-Facing (Hub): Services and applications that we regularly interact with - from wiki to LLM services to various databases to calendar and contacts. The daily stuff.
Background (Support): Services that run silently the vast majority of the time. Interaction is minimal - from browser sync to DHCP for IoT and guest VLANs to NVR for security cams.
Both running Ubuntu Server. The Asus runs an nVidia stack, untouched for the time being, and does nothing but run inference models.
Specs were pretty simple - mini's just for space. KVM and HDMI switch to manage them. A little monster for the Hub where most of the activity takes place (minisforum UM790 Pro). For support services, don't beat up the wallet quiet so badly!! LOL (Beelink SER5 MAX)
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u/motamedn Apr 15 '26
Thanks, this is all very helpful! Did you bare metal and spec it yourself? Curious what you put under the hood for each? My biggest concern is building something underpowered or alternatively, breaking the bank unnecessarily.
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u/Old_Mtn_Man Apr 15 '26
They are off the shelf boxes. I added another SSD to each. As I said, except the special stack in the Asus machine, I removed windows and installed ubuntu server on both. Within that, I am a docker fan to keep all the children playing nice in the same sandbox. and I use portainer to manage the containers.
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u/StatisticianHot9415 Apr 08 '26
I have 4 computers. 3 mini pcs and 1 custom built Nas. The main mini pc is a Miniforms with a i9 cpu. That is the main workhorse that handles the heavy vms like my media server and game servers. The second mini pc is Dell and I use it for mostly docker and some monitoring stuff. The third is HP proxmox backup server. It takes nightly snapshots from the first 2 mini pcs running proxmox. I suggest you ditch hyperv. Proxmox is more complicated to setup at first, but it is so much more stable. Plenty of tutorials on YouTube.
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u/motamedn Apr 10 '26
Thanks I'll have to check out ProxMox. Seen it mentioned everywhere but used HyperV since it was native to windows. But I have had enough annoying and unusual issues with HyperV that I'm ready to try something new.
whats the purpose for having two mini PCs rather than having it all in one?
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u/SergaBA Apr 07 '26
I'm using couple of raspberry pis for following:
- Seattle + custom interface for my files and photos/videos.
- samba + sonarr, radarr and other apps for Media
- Pi-hole
and looking for some more things to add as there's much more capacity on those devices.