Get a NUC or old laptop and install your distro of choice on it. Much less hassle than barely supported ARM boards with ancient kernels.

Used micro PC is often the best deal. Companies offload old SFF i5 and lower machines all the time. They’re all over eBay.

Also to consider are NUCs. I for one got a Firebat with N100 and 8 or 16 GB of RAM and it was already a few years ago cheaper than a RPi 4.

N100 CPU beats any SBC in every aspect except maybe power? Still very low consumption tho. This will leave you headroom for years of selfhosting, because once you get going, there is no coming back.

Nothing more valuable in privacy terms than keeping your photos off the cloud (immich), then data off the cloud (copyparty, nextcloud,...). It never stops and the n100 will support that no problem.

Unless you specifically need ultra low power draw, a minipc is always a better bang for your buck, the cheapest solution is the dusty old laptop sitting on the shelf at the back of your closet....

Scrounge an old laptop, maybe super cheap if the screen isn't completely working. Plug in a monitor to deal with screen problems.

Have a look at DietPi. That is a single-board-computer optimized Linux distribution that, in contradiction to what the name might suggest, runs on (almost) all of the SBC’s out there. It has stripped away all the things you don’t need and only installs and loads what is needed to run the software you choose, resulting in a very lightweight but powerful operating system for these kinds of devices. It has its own software catalog with a broad selection of optimized software, but you can of course install anything you want. Ive been running this on a Raxda Rock4 without any problems, and would definitely suggest this even on a Raspberry over the regular Pi image.

If you dont need an sbc or something arm based mini pcs/thin clients/laptops work well. I run redlib, yamtrack and a monero node on hp t630 w/ 16GB ram (bought before the rampocalypse for ~ $60) and a torrent seedbox/streaming nas on wyse 3040 (~$10). Here's a great website about thin clients https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml

Going directly against your ask: a raspberry pi 3b is cheap and has what you need. :)

I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
Perhaps a similar device could work for you?

As others mentioned used SFF PCs, here's my recommendation based on my own experience.

I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They're tiny, silent (no fan) and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter (PCIe A/E key -> M key) in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them (that was before prices went nuts).
Beware, only if you pick the right dual ranked RAM modules (e.g. Patriot PSD416G26662S), you can have a max. of 2x16 GB. To start your journey, 4 or 8 GB might just be enough and don't cost an arm and a leg.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers and lxc, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average. Dunno about current prices though.

It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Maybe it fits your needs as well?

I actually have one of these: Dell Optiplex 3020 Micro

Has a 16 GB RAM max. Doesn't come with HDMI but you can utilize one of these VGA/HDMI or Display port /HDMI

Surprisingly snappy little machines. Drop in another 8 GB stick of RAM for $25 and you're off to the races.

Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 maxed out to 32 gb RAM are pretty nice too and can be found on Amazon for around $125.

I run a RockPro64 with Arch Arm. No need for a monitor - you just connect over SSH.

I've owned a few devices like Orange Pi but really more as a curiosity that I never did much with. I have, however, seen discussions suggesting that when you move away from the RasPi ecosystem, support for various tooling gets more complicated because you're in a much smaller pool of hardware and this makes them more effort to setup. I don't know the validity of that, but it sounded plausible to me.

Just get a Pi. Just because you don't need wifi doesn't mean it won't potentially be useful down the road.

Dell 3060 Micro.

A larger sized used motherboard or even a new cheap one often has more capability if you can deal with something that is larger..

Get an old Android phone, possibly with a dead screen (bootloader must be unlocked). Flash PostmarketOS on it, or (if not supported) Termux. Its idle usage (with WiFi on, screen off) may be considerably less than 1w. It'll have considerable amounts of CPU cores and RAM, more than a cheap VPS.

This was just posted to selfhosted, and does a great job showing what RPi is competing with.

It's a tool for seeing actual idle wattage draw for a lot of mini-PCs.

Many are in the single-digit idle power - the RPi claim to fame - but have a lot more capability than Pi, plus come in useful packages.

Just thought it would be a useful link for here.

If you don't mind some low specs, and are focused on lowest price, a potato pi runs for about $30 IIRC, and is plenty to do small stuff like an openvpn server.

Last I checked (roughly 2 years ago, preRAM price spike) SBCs weren't the most cost effective option for self hosting anymore. I would actually look into used thin clients or desktops. Even new, the hardware is often less expensive and more capable than SBCs. Sometimes they're also more power efficient.

As for community support for the SBCs other than RPi, for most of them it has been close to non existent. Some better than others but the RPi was the community favorite and got all the attention due to its low price at the time.

@GreenShimada old thin clients or similar (google Project TinyMiniMicro for a decent guide!) are perfect for this use case. x86, most of them have intel quicksync for transcoding, they are energy efficient and quiet.

It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.

A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.

And I've already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣

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

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
NVMe	Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
PCIe	Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
PoE	Power over Ethernet
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
VPS	Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

---

13 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.

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There are companies dealing with used and refurbished hardware. There are loads of PCs around that are not bloated enough for Win11, but still make good home servers. Depending on specs and prices, buy more than one for extra RAM, a second SSD, and spare parts.

Used Lenovo mini PCs are nice (m720q for example)

Or for example the Futro S740 if you do not need the power of the m720q

For a first machine a used Mac mini, especially one that precedes the T2 chip(although that’s not a deal breaker) is probably the best bang for the buck, solid hardware that will get what most people really want from a server unless they want a full on homelab, and they are easy to find cheaply on eBay. Also comes with the advantage of being able to run OSX with fewer hoops if you had a specific use case for that(running blue bubbles in the background or syncing to iCloud… mostly just convenience stuff if you have a leg in that ecosystem could also make a potential slow migration away less irritating)

If you can find a cheap NUC first tell me where because they are great options

Lenovo think centers can be found refurbed for under $100 too and will also be available for a long time because those fuckers were in every bank, hospital/drs office, and all manner of non-tech related offices for years and years.

Or you could be like me and jump two feet in with a used enterprise server, I dunno if I’d recommend this but I do know a lot more than I did when I started and have tons power and capacity to expand. And I’ve gotten more than enough use out of them to justify the $300ish I paid for my Poweredges plus electric bills. But do your research it took me a year to find documents on how to bypass the idrac drive virtualization bullshit and my power draw significantly dropped afterwards

I went rpi4>n100> a couple n100s and that pi> the dxp4800, I think it's a pentium, and those n100s. I think I'm ok here, I have networking, compute + local backup, and storage all in their own box.

Lenovo thinkcentre tinys

I've used a RockPro64 and a Rock Pi 4 for that purpose before. They do it quite well.

The main reason people recommend Raspberry Pi's when talking SBCs is the software support (OS choices) and comminity size.

No one in the SBC industry beats Raspberry Pi at those things, and they can be quite important ones.

I'm using soquartz compute modules on soquartz blades, because of the nvme slot and PoE. Just one cable for each is so nice in a tiny rack. They are running dietpi and docker swarm with dokploy.

I generally recommend the pine64 stuff, but shipping and tax might be high depending on where you live :/

It probably isn’t going to cost less to get something without wifi.

I see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay

radxa has very good sbc’s at the most economical pricing and great software support. only thing is they get sold out pretty quickly. something like X4 or rock 5B will be best for your needs. dragon q6a is also extremely efficient but they get sold out almost immediately after stock comes.

they sell through https://arace.tech/so subscribe to them if for back in stock alerts

Nanopi. I have a couple. They’re not bad.

I have a RPI 4b and 3 lenovos (m93p, m710q, p330).

You can't beat the RPI for power draw (~2w idle and ~7w under max load) but I suspect if you wanted to look at $ to utility measure you'd probably prefer the Lenovo M93P. $50 USD. Mine has i7-4785t, 16GB ddr3 (2x8iirc?) with ethernet, USB etc. Bought 2023/4. I expect base model is still that price now (mines upgraded). The only caveat is that it doesn't have HDMI, it has display port out, but that's just a $5 dongle or SSH issue. M73 would be a touch cheaper.

Iirc the TDP is 35w max and can be lowered / undervolted a touch (don't update the BIOS - it blocks throtlestop).

I turned mine into a retro PC slash game server for the kids (luanti etc). But the siren call of doing truly impossible things with the RPI is too beguiling :)

Eg: running diet pi (headless) with all of my services (media stack, privacy, docs, search, images etc) takes about 300 megabytes (or 650mb if I have to boot into xfce).

300mb, 2-3w.

That shouldn't be possible. I love it.

My next goal is to create an expert system / pseudo llm that sources answers based on user provided markdown or PDF, ZIM files and 4get search or Tavily.

The advantage here is that 1) speed will be stupid fast as no neural network crap (outside of optional extra Markov chain garnish) 2) not stochastic (but allow for llm as optional "plug in module" - pi might actually run a 135M at non glacial speeds) 3) still serves openAI compat endpoint.