150$ is rather ambitious for what you are describing as a custom made low power server. Managing to build something… Anything commercial out of new, hell even refurbished parts that has enough horse power to run anything more than a pihole/DNS server at this price point would be a challenge and a half. If you’re going refurbished/2nd hand, you’re likely gonna spend half of that on just shipping the parts to you.

I believe you are vastly underestimating the price of new low end parts and vastly overestimating the capabilities and availability of old micro servers. I’d say something like this would work at a price range of around 300~400$ (and even that’s ambitious imo).

And even then, that’s a NICHE audience you’d be targeting. It would be people who don’t wanna pay subscriptions, but also don’t wanna be bothered to spend a day or 2 figuring out how to set up a simple linux box on an old computer they have. I’m not saying that audience doesn’t exist, it’s just veeeeery niche.

Mainstream search engines (google and bing) are completely useless. Alternatives ftw.

I’m biased towards TrueNAS scale, because in my experience, it’s been really rock solid, running on bare metal. It also allows you to setup things like Nextcloud/Tailscale/ a lot more, in 1 click from their “app store”. It’s also got all the virtualization bells and whistles. As for ZFS, again, just like everything else, it’s been rock solid and setting up a ZFS pool is pretty much done for you when you install TN Scale.

As for remote access, I’ve always personally done it via a local Wireguard server and can’t really compare it to tailscare or whatever cloudflare does… Because I’ve never used those.

If you need a GPU just for encoding, go on the 2nd hand market and pick up a used Nvidia RTX 2000/3000 card. Intel Arc could also work, but it’s a bit quirky afaik…

Playing from another device is the main thing for me, as it’s very convenient… I am also in a “family” plan with a few of my friends and pay a fraction of what a regular premium subscription costs… It’s all just convenience, really.

E: Also, besides tidal, do they really have any serious competition?

That’s just another reminder to stop using Google

I mean, all of my cables are CAT 5e and I can easily pull a gigabit down and up from my NAS… Which has a gigabit NIC, so ig you’re right.

CAT8 40MB/s

I think you went a but overkill with that one, high quality CAT6 cables would have done the same job, but hey, if it works, it works.

For desktop CPUs… Higher number = better. That’s it. i5 > i3 > pentium, 11xxxx > 10xxxx > 9xxx… etc. For laptop CPUs… Good luck

If you hate it so much… why are you on it atm?

100% Agree, it feels like most documentation is written in a way that expects you to already know what it’s talking about… When it’s the documentation’s job to teach me about it.

2020 called, they want their opinion back I respectfully disagree

I mean… Bad documentation isn’t specific to selfhosting.

Benefits:

• Cheap storage that I can use both locally and as a private cloud. Very convenient for piracy storing all my legally obtained files.

• Network wide adblocking. Massive for mobile games/apps.

• Pivate VPN. Really useful for using public networks and bypassing network restrictions.

• Gives me an excuse to buy really cool, old server and networking hardware.

As for things I wish I knew… Don’t use windows for servers. Just don’t.

SMB sucks, try NFS.

Use docker, managing 5 or 10 different apps without containers is a nightmare.

Bold of you to assume I’m a computer scientist or engineer or that I have a degree lmao. I just hate ads, subscriptions and network restrictions, so I learned how to avoid those things. As for resources to get started… Look up TrueNAS scale. It basically does all of the work for you.

The main things for me are: Wireguard, NextCloud and an NFS/SMB share and a torrent client (Deluge)

I mean, if music is all you are using youtube for, you could piracy Spotify

I power off my main server during the night cuz it’s too loud, but I have a secondary one (an old mini-pc) to handle sh!t like wireguard, PiHole and DNS

16 GB is pleeeeenty for TrueNAS scale

It’s say definitely try TrueNAS scale, it’s dead simple to setup and dead simple to use. You can also run VMs on it along side the apps.

Not really easy to selfhost atm, but FOSS and we’ll get there eventually…

https://writedown.app

Are they? I’ve never really ran one…