Cheaper to rent a decent vps than to pay for the electricity for some old slug of a machine in your house in this economy
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Eh, just use what you have lying around. My first was my kiddos beat to shit school Thinkpad X230 (figured it was indestructible, wrong, but it still goes, so sorta, with dings, got 'em another cleaner one which still gets used long after school) renewed with Debian. (still a backup, much power saving virtue to laptops as home servers).
These days it's just a bunch of podman services (that I can literally drag and drop) on immutable OSs across a few devices, some of which are on all the time (and low power, laptops with gluetun proxies, SearxNG, etc). Some higher power, Immich etc. on the desktop, with shit tons of storage (pre idiocy), that gets turned on for gaming weekly or yeah, local LLM experimentation. I get ppl wanting to play with local servers, more power (heh) to them, hope you've got solar and batteries.
Suppose I was just arguing against the justified purchase premise, or at least the less considered version. If all you have now is a phone, have at it. But consider old (especially business class) laptops. Who doesn't love built in battery power supply and easy serviceability.
Good luck OP.
People buy home servers? They don't just find them lying about and say to themselves "I'll put Debian on this old piece of shit and see what I can get away with running"?
Huh.
Yeah it's less like something new and more like "Thank you, ancient me, for deciding it was always a good policy to go heavy on the RAM."
I mean, parts gotta come from somewhere.
The real trap of the home server is the ever increasing need for more storage space
I often find computers in trash, a stick of ram here an HDD there. Didn't spend a euro on my server.
I mean, mine is a dumpster dive. Itβs an old small form factor office pc. Tore out the guts and stuck them in a silver stone case with a SATA backplane and loaded it up with refurb hard drives.
Previous iteration was a broken g5 tower case I got for free, hacked with an old server motherboard that had been decommissioned at work.
So, definitely spent money on it with the additions, but all my home servers have started out with free spare parts.
Oh, I do of course run Debian.
Mine is my dad's old 2014 Mac mini with a bunch of USB hard drives hanging out of it.
Ideal? Probably not.
But it mostly works pretty well. All I've bought specifically for it are the NVME adapter so I could drop my wife's old 256gb M.2 drive in, a 1tb SATA SSD for the internal bay, and a 3.5" enclosure for a 2tb HDD I had knocking about.
And she's rock solid. Mostly.
Pssh. You bought your home server instead of just assembling it from a box of scraps you had lying around?
Ok, hear me out. Yes it was built from scraps, but see what had happened was:
I had to replace the motherboard and got a good deal on one bundled with RAM at MicroCenter. Got it home to do the swap and realized Iβd bought an ATX board when I had a mid tower.
So then I went and bought a nice big new case so I had space to work in. Then I found my power supply (which was reused, but missing cables and this wasnβt an issue before) was missing cables I needed.
So another trip to MicroCenter and coming up empty on these damn cables I needed for the power supply I said fuck it and bought a new one. Only to get it home of course and find out the fucking connectors were non standard mini connectors and the cables that came with it were too short.
So I had to run back to MicroCenter and swap it.
So more money than I tracked later and I basically ended up with the Server of Theseus.
Oh and then after a couple of months my reused RX480 started triggering thermal shutdowns (I think) so I ended up replacing my 1080TI with a 3080 and tossed the 1080 in the server.
look at this blessed individual who has a MicroCenter within reach, lucky you!
Itβs a bit of a drive tbh. Like 45 minutes, but still within reach.
I miss Fryβs tho.
I like the detail of her ditching the sweater due to the heat of all the computers.
On a related note, is Serial Experiments: Lain actually available to watch anywhere, or would I have to take to the high seas?
Just came across these full series videos in a search:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHSbAz1hu9sRXDQasCqDcq1oQDIm0sf0M
It's on any of the myriad of anime sites. You also shouldn't pay for media that could legally drive.
Edit: myriad
*myriad
Probably, but it's also the perfect excuse the relearn sailing the high seas if you haven't done it in a while.
Haha, I guess!
fmhy dot net!
Wait, there are legitimate anime sources?
If you watched it long ago and liked it, you might wish to just leave it there. Just my entirely-worthless opinion here, but I recently rewatched it for the first time in decades and for me it did not hold up at all.
I donβt see it on Netflix or Crunchyroll currently.
Thanks for reminding me. I spend far to long trying to remember where that picture was from.
(Also: setting sails for the high seas...)
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Homeserver in this economy?
Yeah man, think of all the money youβll save on streaming subscriptions once you build it
(Just ignore the usenet, VPN, and indexer costs)
/s
My take is, I'd rather spend double on all that (becuase I can), support and share with other users, than give a dime to fucking corpos pushing ai slop and promoting fascist military invasions (that'd be Spotify).
Oh Iβm right there with you.
Not only that, then I own my media. Sure its more work, but I actually find it fun so win win
Uhhh... I just pirate it.
Yeah. Youd be surprised how many people just throw away computers. Ask around, im sure someone you know has one lying around theyd like to get rid of (maybe with some minor problem like needing a new hard drive or something)
Hard drives are so expensive I'm considering buying a 2U chassis and using old drives to expand my NAS as opposed to replacing small drives with larger ones. The only thing holding me back is the effort and the noise.
I have 20 500GB HDDs I got for free off a client who was disposing of some old desktops, daisy chained through a series of powered USB hubs currently hosting my Jellyfin and Immich content.
I regret nothing.
I would regret the power usage of running 20 small hard drives as opposed to a few big ones but the cost of electricity is definitely still smaller than the cost of big hard drives
"Finally... Now I can compile Firefox and use it in the same afternoon."
My home server is just my old android device, cleaner than any of your weird stuff
Can you describe your setup? Termux with proot docker implementation (forgot the name)?
I'm about to get a bunch of old phones and want to make some use of them.
It's udocker
Disagree, more like the opposite. Now all my machines can be managed with portable scripts that handle common tasks. When I used windows I didn't even bother scripting usually because it's a shit show. And fuck powershell before anyone says "it's totally not that bad despite the non standard... Practically everything"
this is not realistic in the current economy π
She got another Stuffed bear! Thanks linux!
I have high availability that requires 2.5x the maintenance. My CPUs draw 0.1-0.6 times the electricity and I have 10 of them. My base OS is more secure but my VM OSes pull from repos in 5 sanctioned countries. I don't have to pay for tokens because I self-host my own LLMs using 4 rtx5090s and 256GB of RAM (that I purchased in summer 2026).
Well ooh lala mr money bags. (Also: nice!)
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Cyberia Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dbi4N6NGn4
If you ever wondered why The Matrix tied EDM to the Hackerscene, blame this song
Iβm two episodes into Serial Experiments Lain and this looks about right for where things are headed.
I really enjoyed it, hope you like it.
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