Ask HN: Best Low-Power, Budget-Friendly, and Capable Home Server Setup?

2 johnnykree 0 6/5/2025, 8:03:59 AM

Hello.

I'm planning to build my first home server and am looking for the best combination of:

    Low power consumption

    Affordable price (used or new)

    Good performance for self-hosted apps

Use cases:

    Docker containers for things like Linkding, Karakeep, a personal Wiki

    Self-hosted Bitwarden

    Small Nextcloud instance

    Jellyfin (light use, just streaming a few movies to the TV)

    Lightweight game servers (e.g., Terraria)

    Maybe some basic platformers on the TV (just a bonus, not a must)

I'm currently considering:

    A used Mac Mini M1

    The new Mac Mini M4

    Old office minis like Dell Optiplex / HP 800 G4 with i5-8500T

    Chinese mini PCs from Minisforum, Beelink, Geekom, etc.

I'd love to hear your experience or suggestions. What's the best value setup you've found for this kind of home lab?

McSee: Evaluating Rowhammer Attacks and Defenses via DRAM Traffic Analysis (comsec.ethz.ch)

Lessons from a FAT God: An Introspective on the FAT filesystems (elianrieza.dev)

Doge Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts (propublica.org)

Chocolate Quake source port preserving original experience even bugs and quirks (github.com)

Displaying Korean Text Efficiently (oberg.org)

Napster.com Faced ISP Piracy Blockade for "Massive Copyright Violations" (torrentfreak.com)

Processing Nebula Images with Open Source Tools vs$350 Software (astroimagery.com)

M&S hackers sent abuse and ransom demand directly to CEO (bbc.co.uk)

Xiaohongshu(Rednote) released its dots.llm open source AI model (github.com)

Crustal to mantle melt storage during the evolution of Hawaiian volcanoes (science.org)

AI Leaders and Builders Fireside Chat (supermomos.com)

Natural Intelligence Is Sexy (warandpeas.com)

Show HN: Colorcura – Visualize color palettes inside live UI components (colorcura.site)

Competitive Coder's Handbook [pdf] (cses.fi)

How to (actually) send DTMF on Android without being the default call app (edm115.dev)

I Let ChatGPT Make All My Architectural Decisions for a Month: The Surprising R (medium.com)

Alpaca's MCP Server for Trading/Quotes (github.com)

AI isn't coming for your job–it's coming for your company (fastcompany.com)

Three Types of Math Acceleration (kidswholovemath.substack.com)

BetterAuth vs. NextAuth (devtoolsacademy.com)

Swift and Cute 2D Game Framework: Setting Up a Project with CMake (layer22.com)

How to Use Vheer Text to Image Generator: A Beginner's Guide (readability.com)

Show HN: Book to help you build a PostgreSQL-like database server from scratch (technicaldeft.com)

Conventional commit generator using local LLMs (wimpysworld.com)

MCP Resources Are for Caching (timkellogg.me)

Balloons and Human Strength: How North Korea Righted a Toppled Warship (nytimes.com)

Fuzzer Blind Spots (Meet Jepsen) (tigerbeetle.com)

It's 2025 and Apple still has not fixed the audio left/right balance bug (twitter.com)

What you need to know about EMP weapons (aardvark.co.nz)

Now that we have stoves at home, restaurants are doomed (idiallo.com)

Aspects to video generation that may not be fully appreciated (Andrej Karpathy) (twitter.com)

Show HN: Internal URL Shortener (simpleurl.tech)

Weaponizing Dependabot: Pwn Request at its finest (boostsecurity.io)

Jepsen: TigerBeetle 0.16.11 (jepsen.io)

Streaks on Martian slopes are dry (nature.com)

AWS European Sovereign Cloud (aboutamazon.eu)

The AI Prompts Doge Used to "Munch" Contracts Related to Veterans' Health (propublica.org)

Bonfire Social 1.0 Release Candidate (bonfirenetworks.org)

Show HN: Personalized AI in Email (talaria.email)

Optimizing 1979's Manbiki Shounen: Shoplifting Boy for Commodore PET [video] (youtube.com)

From vibe code to production deployment

Show HN: Chat4Data, ChatGPT style web scraping extension (chat4data.ai)

The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre) (github.com)

German Commercial Register API (docs.registercheck.de)

AMD Radeon 8050S "Strix Halo" Linux Graphics Performance Review (phoronix.com)

Neural network-assisted handwriting analysis for Parkinson's diagnostics (nature.com)

Cognito M2M Pricing Changes (danieloldberg.se)

Show HN: Partycles – Zero-dependency React animations library with 11 effects (github.com)

Just 15 buyers are in charge of £14B in UK central government tech spending (theregister.com)

An Earnest Guide to Symbols in Common Lisp (kevingal.com)

Ask HN: Best Low-Power, Budget-Friendly, and Capable Home Server Setup?

Comments (0)