My Self Hosting Journey

i think the best choice is a cheap used pc or laptop, or server. Reduces electric waste. I also host my own server on a 19 year old Dell Insprion 1300
- Yes, but also no. Older hardware is less power efficient, which is a cost in its own right, but also decreases backup runtime during power failure, and generates more noise and heat. It also lacks modern accelerated computing, like ai cores or hardware video encoders or decoders, if you are running those appd. Not to mention lack of nvme support, or a good NIC.
  For me a good compromise is to recycle hardware upgrades every 4-5 years. A 19 year old computer? I would not bother.
  
  Bro, I am just hosting a WordPress backup, an RSS reader, and a few Python scripts
- Yeah what I’ve always done is use the previous gaming/workstation PC as a server.
  I just finished moving my basic stuff over to newer old hardware that’s only 6-7 years old, to have lots of room to grow and add to it. It’s a 9700k (8c/8t) with 32GB of ram and even a GTX 1080 for the occasional video transcode. It’s obviously overkill right now, but I plan to make it last a very long time.
- Think centre tiny here
  Low consumption, two ddr4 slots, one 2.5" slot and one nvme slot! Lots of outside slots.
  Costed less used than a new pi too. They have gotten too expensive IMO.
  
  Pi has gotten crazy expensive.
  
  Same mentality but HP Elitedesk Minis

I need a kubernetes cluster with high availability, load balancing and horizontal pod autoscaling, because that is something I want to learn. I don't care that it's just for wife's home-made dog collars webshop.
- This is the way
- You can do it on a handful of Raspberry Pis rather than one, then.
  
  I don't get this; a Pi isn't even in the same conversation as an old rackmount server you can get for free. You couldn't stuff half the compute, ram and storage into a Pi or a dozen Pis for 10X the cost of grabbing something off eBay for a hundred bucks.
  That's if the Rpi Foundation is deigning to let us peasants even buy them these days.
  
  Imagine, if you will, a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pis!

Wait, you can host a website on a raspberry pi !? But is it really cheaper than shared hosting, for instance? And even then, quality-wise, it cannot be that good, can it?
- My understanding is raspberrypi.com is hosted on raspberry pis. It's a Linux computer; it can do anything a Linux computer can do.

three raspberries pi running k3s is good enough for me

A mini PC is a good middle ground. Mostly for the video transcode and machine learning power.
- Yeah, a mini PC... or if you already have one, why not 5 mini PCs?
- I'm not sure if I'm alone in this but I have a terrible aversion to transcoding. I know the loss of quality is probably not that huge (depending on the original codec) but I just can't bring myself to get past it.
  As a result I have a tiny arm based box with a 2tb SSD and I'm happy out.
  
  You want to avoid it everywhere possible of course.
  But when the GF tries to use Jellyfin on whatever random device that doesn't have the codec support to play it, it is nice to have.
- That's what Iam aiming for at the next hardware update. I don't have the space for a server rack and a SFF desktop would also not fit into my home, so a miniPC it'll be. I cannot wait to move to x86.

I love my little k3s box and having all my config in git

I need
It's just fun to play with, there is no "need".
- Yeah, I enjoyed my time with k3s setup at home as well, but right now I don't really want nor need that 😄

Switched from a raspberry pi 3 to a second hand x86 thin client (lenovo thinkcentre m920q) because raspberry pi 4 were not available at the time. Made me learn proxmox and a bunch of other cool stuff my raspi couldn't handle.
I'm rooting for ARM / RISC-V to become more popular in desktop computing / servers though.
- I've always liked riscv. Just the idea of literally everything on the device being open source is a fun idea. Manuals to everything.
- Is there RISC-V hardware already? I thought the specification was still under development.
  
  Very much so, not quite ready for prime time maybe, but you can play with, StarFive is quite well-known for their chips in this space for example
  
  There are some Raspi competitors offering SBCs with RISC-V chips, there is even a RISC-V Mainboard for the framework laptops, but the last time I checked they sadly didn't reach the performance levels of comparable ARM chips.
- Waiting for proxmox-arm becoming a thing (I know there's some community versions trying it but I'm not sure how reliable they are)
  
  The hardware virtualisation available for arm just isn’t there yet

I spend all day at work exploring the inside of the k8s sausage factory so I'm inured to the horrors and can fix basically anything that breaks. The way k8s handles ingress and service discovery makes it absolutely worth it to me. The fact that I can create an HTTPProxy and have external-dns automagically expose it via DNS is really nice. I never have to worry about port conflicts, and I can upgrade my shit whenever with no (or minimal) downtime, which is nice for smart home stuff. Most of what I run tends to be singleton statefulsets or single-leader deployments managed with leases, and I only do horizontal for minimal HA, not at all for perf. If something gives me more trouble running in HA than it does in singleton mode then it's being run as a singleton.
k8s is a complex system with priorities that diverge from what is ideal for usage at home, but it can be really nice. There are certain things that just get their own VM (Home Assistant is a big one) because they don't containerize/k8serize well though.

I've discovered that there are a lot of medium-tier software engineers who immediately will go straight to horizontal scaling (i.e: just throw hardware at it), and I've seen instances where very highly skilled engineers just write their code better, set things up on a bare metal server, cache things, etc. and manage with just a single badass server
- Right? I just spin up another process on my home server. No need to get more hardware involved for something that's inherently a software problem.
- Even just the choice of programming language makes a big difference. Running a JVM language or NodeJS, Python, Ruby etc., you can be bottlenecked by a Pi. Meanwhile, Rust or C/C++ will use barely a fraction of those resources.

Yup, a pi is enough for me.
Well... 5 Pis and an ancient NUC running proxmox are enough for me. And a DS920+... and an old laptop running docker are enough for me.

Ha ha
Under-complicated -> over-complicated -> under-complicated.
There's a 'just right' that I think you skipped through.

Do you run Docker in a VM or on the host node? I'm running a lot of LXC at home on Proxmox but sometimes it'd be nice to run Docker stuff easily as well.
- Just create an LXC container to run your dockers, all you have to do is make sure you run the LXC as privileged and enable nesting.
  
  Thanks for the tip, for some reason I assumed I couldn't run docker in LXC but never actually tried... I prefer to avoid the overhead of a full VM and I find LXCs way easier to manage from the host system. Guess I'll have something to test this weekend. Cheers!
  
  There are security performance and capability concerns with that approach, apparmor on the first layer lxc probably being the most annoying.
  If you want to isolate your docker sandbox from your main host, you should use a vm not a container.

With Linux any old computer from yesteryear can become a quick server. That's what I do, just make sure you got backups.
- My home server is literally made from garbage left over from other PCs. The motherboard is currently some piece of junk from a prefab PC with a custom power socket, so I got to make my own adapter from scratch.
- Yup! When I built a gaming comphter last year my old desktop became my first dive into linux. Probably overkill, but ive been having a blast with it.
  
  Nice!
- Floor PCs FTW

As a developer and not a sysadmin, I refuse to learn anything more than docker. It's good enough for me 😤
Edit: on a more serious note, proxmox with docker containers has been more than enough for me
- Do you run Docker in a VM or on the host node? I'm running a lot of LXC at home on Proxmox but sometimes it'd be nice to run Docker stuff easily as well.
  
  It's kind of redundant but I run Docker in minimal debian LXCs. I like the speed of LXCs but I still love the reproducibility of Docker so I combine them lol. I do run regular VMs with docker for systems that are doing more than one thing

rPi with k3s installed
- None of the power, all of the hassle 💪💪
- How does that compare to microk8s? I have been using that for a while and like the plugins.
- k3s
  kbnts?
  
  That's not a typo: https://k3s.io/
  It's basically a Kubernetes cluster, which you can run locally on your PC. Really useful for playing around with Kubernetes before you move to a 'proper' environment.

I've been enjoying Jeff Geerling's ongoing experiments with his 10" Raspberry Pi mini rack.
It doesn't work for me since all of my network equipment is 19" and there's no point in having two racks but having a 10" standard is still a great idea!
- Off-topic but can you tell me why your name is red? I use Voyager and your name is red, it should mean something, right?

Random mixed parts -> 4u unraid server with switch -> random fedora Optiplex that never fails unlike 4u server

Ain't nobody got time for that