I have an early 2000s PC (pre-SATA) with 512MB RAM (I’d love to tell you about the CPU, but its under a cooler that isn’t going anywhere) that’s been sitting in closets for about 15 years. Assuming I’m willing to buy into it, can something like that reasonably host the following simultaneously on a 40GB boot drive:
Nextcloud Actual Photoprism KitchenOwl SearXNG Katvia Paperless-ngx
Or should I just get new hardware? Regardless, I’d like to do something with this trusty ol business server.
Edit: Lenovo or Dell as the most cost-effective, reliable self-host server in your opinion?
My first server was quite a bit tougher than that and it had some serious issues when I started asking it to do a lot at once. You might be able to get it going, but I suspect you might not be too happy with the performance you get out of it.
It’s a bit shocking how much hardware you can get for how cheap. Even an Intel Atom box available for less than a hundred bucks that has no fan would likely run circles around that thing. One thing I’d definitely suggest is no matter what, an SSD if you’re planning to run multiple platforms.
My plan is to keep the bare minimum on the boot drive required to get these services running. This is probably a Linux crowd, but I don’t speak the language and would rather keep it all in Windows if I can help it
Just a heads up that you might find it easier to learn a bit of the lingo than to try to translate all the entry-level stuff from linux to windows.
If you do figure it out though, you should document the process and put it up somewhere.
Best place to learn the basic Linux I’d need to get this off the ground?
The best projects will have well written documentation that steps you through exactly what to do.
I started off not knowing anything about hosting and now I run like 6 services.
In addition to all the other points made here:
If you intend to run Windows on it the RAM issue will be even more important as Windows is a fair bit more resource-intensive just to get the base OS running.
It’s worth taking the time to learn enough Linux to use it for these types of projects, it will pay dividends in efficiency and flexibility.