One place to look at are web sites dealing with company bankruptcies. They are good for purchasing electronics and tools.

Back when windows and office licenses were bound to a sticker with a key number, I bought a stack of broken laptops for 10€. They were leftovers from an auction - nobody wanted them. I removed and tested RAM and harddisks, and then cut out the bottom of those laptops where the license stickers were. I sold each set of licenses, Windows and Office, for 10€ each, making a good profit. And kept the RAM and HDs that worked for my own use.

A bit pricy for home use with 8-10k bucks…

If you have a RPi, install Mozillla Firefox, and Ublock. The only way to watch YT without going nuts.

The “faucet” was water literally streaming in through the broken window during a thunderstorm. One of my coworkers went outside and shielded the window with a wooden board to reduce the flow.

Not selfhosting, but I remember standing in a server room with a hands’ width of water on the ground (and rising), and hastily shutting down servers where the water was already in the case. It were big towers (Compaq Proliant, if anyone remembers), and luckily the board, drives, and PSU were in the top part of the big tower cases, the drive bays at the bottom were empty.

We got all equipment out safely, and we did not get electrocuted, either. We left with the last equipment when the water level was approaching the knees.

Short version: modified MILS plates carry 12V power across the whole layout. Inside those MILS plates is enough space to hide a Raspberry Pi Pico W, which controls lights and motors on this plate. It communicates with the Mosquitto broker to coordinate actions, e.g light effects.

Mosquitto is a MQTT broker.

Several things. Mosquitto to control an ecosystem of LEGO models, some CALDAV syncer, and a mediawiki engine for D&D worldbuilding.

I think it is important to also include hardware in this group, as hardware for selfhosting is different, both from user PCs as they are discussed elsewhere, and from large, professional hosting hardware, which is usually outside the range of selfhosters.

I support striking that part from rule 3.

There are companies dealing with used and refurbished hardware. There are loads of PCs around that are not bloated enough for Win11, but still make good home servers. Depending on specs and prices, buy more than one for extra RAM, a second SSD, and spare parts.

There are companies selling off PCs that are “too small” for Win11, really cheap. More than sufficient for a NAS. You might even get a bunch of them, chose the best mainboard/case/PSU set, put the others in storage, and get all the RAM and HDD in one box.

CC TLDs usually ask for proof of residence.

When there were ISP-owned routers, I just set a private router on the inside. As long as their box does their job, mine did work for me.

Basically, I do. Kubuntu everywhere. Only exception are the servers that run a UI less version of Ubuntu.

If it randomly locks up, try memtest86. It can often be found as a boot alternative in Linux installation images, but it is probably available solo.

As someone who has experienced double failure twice in my lifetime, I seriously recommend doing backups.

The problem is that the only serious backup solution is another HDD for this size. A robot array for tapes or worm drives is probably out of budget.

I’ve got a DELL server that I used as home server, but it was too loud. But it worked well, even at an advanced age. I moved the disks to a normal desktop machine (not DELL) that is much, much quieter.

Apt update and upgrade happen automatically.

Linux server administration tool, web interface based. Makes managing servers way easier.

I just repurposed one of our older PCs for that task. Slap Ubuntu on it, install webmin, and you’re set up.