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Recently I've taken to self hosting. It started with me just wanting a raspberry pi for pi-hole and has developed into a full hobby. Because so many of these services are FOSS and can run on a toaster it's helped me immensely with avoiding commercial fatigue. I also find that the communities for the hobby are insightful and, because the solutions are free, they aren't selling you on a product. They're just passionate about the service, distro, or setup that they use.
I've also learned a ton of applicable skills for adult life, so happy side-effects.
What do you recommend hosting because oddly enough I already want a server but I don't know what to host. I feel it's such a waste to burn electricity just to produce heat since using electricity in any capacity produces heat so I would literally use my server as a space heater.
I thought of hosting a Minecraft server for friends (or even friends of friends) and folding @ home as well. I already have a computer much better suited for file hosting so I would not need more of that.
What will you be hosting on? I started with a raspberry pi. It was important to me to host on something outside my main machine. I chose the pi because it would run linux, use very little electricity, and would remain out of the way.
Initially it was for pi-hole. Which is a network wide DNS filter used to block ads (with some exceptions like YT). That got me more interested in my own privacy. So, I added a searx instance to my pi. It's an aggregate search engine that searches a bunch of search engines and won't track me. Or at least I'm tracking myself.
I've never run a minecraft server on a pi but I have a friend who has. It was fine for up to about 4 people.
From there I actually built a rig specifically for hosting. It's a little more stout than the pi. On it I run Proxmox (which I use to create linux containers for the other things I host). I do run a file share on it. It's nice because it's easy to run weekly backups so I don't lose things. I also run a vpn, qbittorrent (for linux isos), jackett (indexes torrents), sonarr (used to... find movies I'm missing), jellyfin (to watch said movies anywhere in the house) and finally I do host a valheim server there for my friend's and I.
Honestly I would at least start with a dedicated machine for it, maybe an old laptop, a pi, just anything cheap that if you screw up you can wipe and start over. From there: pi hole, seaex, retro game box maybe? There's really a lot of things you can host. Find a need you have a Google a linux solution for it. There's almost always one.
I work as a computer repair technician and my workplace has some really old cheap (90$) server hardware for sale. They have 32gb of DDR3 and old dual xeon 5606. I would probably upgrade them because old xeons are dirt cheap. They also have some old workstations too that could be suitable for hosting, similar amounts of ram but new processors.
Not energy efficient but that's fine since they would literally be a space heater, and if maxed out those old CPUs can still get some work done.
Honestly, that's not bad for a start. That Xeon should be fine for most things. I run an amd 4650g pro and never get close to using it all.
Side Note: The people over at !selfhosted@lemmy.world have been immensely helpful for me in my brief journey so far.