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Replying to Toby's post about selfhosting.
gemini://tobykurien.com/articles/2022-05-17-smol-data-centre.gmi
My selfhosting philosophy is very close to yours Toby. Some of the details are a little different but largely very much aligned with what you've layed out in your post. I also agree that a lot of people that do this at home go WAY overboard with the hardware and software for personal or even friends/family usage. I do understand the desire to experiment and learn with enterprise-grade solutions. For purely functional purposes you can do a whole lot with very little on the hardware side.
My selfhosting setup has evolved over the years but the general trend has been to move to lower power and less complexity. The previous server was a DIY mini-ITX 4 bay NAS machine. It was an x86 machine with a RAID storage configuration but I decided it really was overpowered for my needs. In terms of both processing power and power consumption. My personal trend towards less complexity in my computing in general was also a factor in needing less processing power. My current setup has been in service for I think over 3 years at this point. Key points below:
Main Server:
Debian based Armbian is the choice and Yunohost makes the install and maintenance of the services easy and reliable. For the actual software I'm hosting on this server it is gmnisrv for this capsule, Nextcloud, Wallabag (read it later/pocket alternative), Miniflux (rss reader) and Metronome (XMPP server).
File Server:
Once again Armbian for the OS and the file server project openmediavault makes the setup and mmaintenance of file shares nice and easy.
Music Server:
Yes, Armbian again for the OS and a very cool combination of lightweight software for playing synchronized multi-room audio. Mopidy for playing the music, Snapcast for piping the music to a handful of speakers over the network.
What I love about my hardware setup is that all three are low power consumption devices with passive cooling and therefore silent. This is great for a home setup because it's not even noticeable on the power bill and there is no noise to deal with. The only noise at all is the spinning up of the 3TB HDD which mostly only happens when watching movies or shows that are stored on the file server. I really like the Odroid HC2 servers for their low power draw and silence while still having plenty of horsepower for my uses. They are actually quite zippy for a low power headless server and have no problem running everything I ask. I don't know how it will change in the future but I do think any change in the setup will most likely be towards more simplicity and lower power.