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Where I live, electricity is also very expensive. I monitor every watt.

I asked the same question half a year ago, here's what I've learnt: RPis tend to be less reliable and aren't that energy efficient. They're great for small appliances, but for servers (e.g. NAS) not as much.

Get an used Thinclient/ mini PC. They cost something between 50-150€ and give you a huge performance boost, more ports, a x86 architecture, are better repairable (still often bad) and more.

Mine uses about 10-15 W on normal use, and 20 rarely when my cloud is under heavy use.

I upgraded my Plex and *arr server (i3 nuc) with a beelink 12i N100 based mini pc and could not be happier. $167 with 512gb nvme and 16gb RAM. It pulls 6W peak power

I use a N100 Mini PC. They're very popular for this purpose these days. Mine has 16GB DDR5.

I've heard good things about used/refurb HP (elite desk and pro desk) and Lenovo (m700 and m900) mini-pcs. A quick search shows they're going for ~120-140$ for a quad core with 16 gigs of memory.

Get a mini pc. If you can find a cheap intel NUC on ebay for example. Way more power in a compact form that doesn't draw that much more power than a rpi.. much less four of them.

Get a cheap SFF desktop, slap some cheap RAM in it and run KVM. It'll be 10X better than a fleet of Pi's.

There's the Orange Pi 5 Plus if you want something really energy efficient. It has 16GB of RAM, an 8 core CPU, dual 2.5G ethernet, and it can use an M.2 2280 SSD. It looks like there's going to be a 32GB version, but it's not available yet.

I had budget to try xeon d soc motherboard for a smal itx case. Put 64gb ecc ram into it but could hold 128gb. That server will be 8 yo this year. That particular supermicro mb was ment for some oem routerlike 64_86x with 10g ports and remote management. I'm not sure if intel or amd have any cpus in that segment anymore, but it's very light on wattage if mostly idle/maintaining vms.

One option I'm looking at is to get a dedicated hetzner server, even the auction and lowest grade 'new' offerings are pretty good for the price if you account for energy costs and upfront gear cost.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #515 for this sub, first seen 15th Feb 2024, 04:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Minisforum makes good basic SFF PCs for super cheap.

I‘d just get an old computer. My server runs my whole homelab with 4 spinning disks, 2 ssds while having 10+ services. It takes 50 watts since it is pretty old but it works well. If I turned off the spinning disks it might be even lower.

If you don't already use it, zram swap is great for providing a little bit extra oomph. If your server doesn't have a lot of compressed data in memory, it can literally more than double your effective ram.

Your best option would probably be to buy a refurbished office PC that has at least 16 gb of RAM.

Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GCX4JKJ

That way you get a bunch of memory in a decent system for cheap, and you’re only using up one port on your switch.

I use a quartz64 from pine. Back when it came out it was beefier than the rpi4. With the 5 that has now changed but it still is a great little machine.

My instance runs on it aswell as my other webservices (A Homepage, cgit instance and a small blog). Handles everything really well with the 8GiB of RAM.

Setup is a bit of a pain, especially because I had the urge to run gentoo on it. Compile times are actually acceptable.

It costs 80 bucks, which is really acceptable.

Edit: Forgot to mention energy efficiancy, ARM is unbeaten by x86 in that department. People on here recommend old PCs a lot, which, depending on your local energy prices could quiet quickly void the savings made by buying it. Also it has a SATA port, which requires some tinkering with the Devicetree to get running but allowed me to use an old 1TB SSD i had in the house.

But any old PC that is x86. Even if it second hand/refurbished (as long as it's a branded pc Like HP, Levono).

I use an oracle free tier server for my heavy lifting (wordpress and owncloud), and have a pi4 on my fibre optic connection which is my storage.