Of course you can always build a good PC or server.

I could have done that too, but I wanted my first real homelab-do-it-all-yourself setup to be a little more on the cautiously small side. I didn’t want to have too much noise in my apartment and also didn’t want to stress my electricity-bill and wallet too much, so I opted to build small and reuse what I had lying around.

I already had 2 Mini-PCs and a raspberry pi from earlier experiments with selfhosting. I just bought some disks and RAM. If you don’t have any mini-PCs, they’re relatively cheap in comparison with full PCs. Or you could use some older PC you still have but do not use.

My motto more or less was you can always spend more money and build bigger later

The final Hardware

• Mini-PC: Zotac ZBox CI665 nano
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4 RAM (according to specs, CI665 cannot go beyond 32GB sadly)
• SSD: 1x 2TB Samsung SATA SSD
• external USB HDD (6TB)

What I host on my Proxmox VE

• CheckMK Monitoring
• GitLab Runner
• pihole (network-wide, DNS-based adblocker)
• Nextcloud (production and staging instance for testing new updates before rolling out to production with my data)
• nginx proxy manager
• syncthing server

The 2nd Mini PC (some old intel NUC with 4 cores and 16 GB RAM) + a USB HDD is my Proxmox Backup Server for all this. And what’s really important (my data from nextcloud + some configs) gets backed up to my Hetzner Storage Box with restic.

The raspberry pi is now my WiFi Access Point :)

Conclusion

Homelab doesn’t need to be big or small, it can be whatever you want it to be or whatever you can afford or are willing to have and maintain. From my experience, if you’re not hosting anything CPU-intensive, older or smaller machines will do just fine.

For example, my nextcloud could easily use more resources than the whole Zotac ZBox could house, if there were more users. But as my services are only used by me, most of them are idle most of the time.

Tip at the end about your opsense-VM on Proxmox

I tried letting Proxmox host my pfSense too, but that got old pretty fast. Whenever Proxmox needed a Reboot, my internet was gone too for that time, as the pfSense VM on Proxmox was the gateway to my ISP-modem. In the end, I just bought a real Netgate pfSense appliance.

I run a beelink mini, not the weakest one, not the most powerful one, and it handles docker containers and VMs fine. I don’t have a tkn of integrated storage, but rather this machine handles apps while a separate NAS does all the file storage. Most I ever had running was 2 VMs and a handful of negligible docker containers but I still had plenty of ram and CPU to spare. I also think the minisforum stuff looks good. Their n5 pro nas just came out and would have made a good server with room to grow. I decided against it because I have parts and I want to use them :-) so the beelink is holding down the fort while I Frankenstein together a rig from my old gaming PC in a huge case that will host all my apps and less critical media. Home assistant which will stay on the beelink because it needs high availability. I’ve been curious how the lowest priced minisforum models would fare.

Almost my entire (excessive) setup is a bunch of used, off lease tiny/mini/micros.

Most ive bought for about $100, then tossed some minor upgrades to like an m2 ssd, maxing out ram, etc, so under $200 altogether historically. Clustered with proxmox, so I even have high availability.

Yes, minis are great. Just do storage elsewhere, which can be a NAS or a generic box you load up with drives.