Look for government / school asset auctions (if you have that). Sometimes you'll find some good hardware after a school does an upgrade.

Chiming in with some post-hardware-acquisition suggestions.

Read up and learn about docker and specifically docker compose. My reverse proxy of recommendation for a beginner is Nginx Proxy Manager. Debian stable server releases are great distros for your use-case.

Use least-access thought for connecting services and networks. For example only jellyfin and jellyseer needs to be on the NPM external network definition and accessible over network, not the underlying *arr stack, VPN, and torrent containers actually searching/acquiring the data.

NPM

• proxy-network

Jellyfin

• proxy-network

Jellyseer

• proxy-network
• arr-network

Radarr

• arr-network
• torrent-network

Sonarr

• arr-network
• torrent-network

QBitTorrent

• torrent-network

Containers are addressable by container name:port if they're within the same network so you don't need to worry about finding a container's specific IP address. Example: when wiring up the Sonarr service's location in the Jellyseer UI, assuming you named the Sonarr container Sonarr you can punch in Sonarr:7777 [this is just a random port for the example] and that Sonarr will resolve to the correct local IP in their shared network (arr-network in this example).

Also on the hardware side get a GPU with hardware AV1 support (the new Intel GPUs are great and cheap for this) as that's the go-forward video codec and you'll save tons in power on transcoding and an absurd amount of storage space over h.264 and a decent bit over h.265. It's also worth updating clients with hardware decoding for AV1 asap so that the server has to transcode less as well (recent fire sticks and new TVs within the last 2 years should handle this already)

Also forgive me if this is all stuff you know already but also enable only key-based ssh access kinda immediately as the amount of port sniffing you'll get on 22 is absurd.

Some more good information while you’re acquiring hardware: keep your drives cool. A case with fans that blow on its drive cages is better than one that doesn’t.

this Wikipedia article has a chart in it that shows what intel integrated gpus support what video codecs. the other person who said about the intel arc gpus for av1 decoding is right, but idk if you wanna spend money on a video card rather than lots of drives. Most stuff from trackers is available h264 anyway.

Make sure you have a backup solution. It might be backblaze for a few bucks a month, but you’ll quickly end up with terabytes of data that actually you can’t download again.

Some sleeper 7/8 generation intel sources are the sff dell inspiron motherboards. They have two pcie slots, a cpu that can do much more if it just had a bigger heatsink and some old gamer case will still fit the weird part that’s supposed to stick out of the front and provide usb and sd card slots.

Bought some stuff here before, SEK is low compared to EUR as well. https://shop.inrego.se/ office stuff refurbished. They only send to Sweden and Finland so you need to have it reshipped for other countries

Your most cost effective move is gonna be finding several generations past gaming cases that had huge hard drive bays for some reason, getting a 6th(?) gen intel motherboard and processor off some offices junk pile and slapping it into that big fucker case.

Things to look out for in your motherboard search: sata ports obviously, but also at least two pcie slots that are like 4x or above. Those are gonna let you slap in additional cards with sata ports and eventually when you go full brainworms, a sas host and expander card.

Don’t do a raid for your data array. Accessing data has to spin up all the drives at once and that means your aging power supply will falter sooner. Some kind of jbod like mergerfs with a daily parity calculation like snapraid will be easier on the system and work just fine.