I am not looking to onboard thousands of users or host large communities, just my own and some family and close friends’ accounts. I don’t currently have a scalable homeserver setup (just a local Home Assistant instance on a Pi) and don’t have the space to put an old desktop running Proxmox on a cable.
I was browsing single-board computers and the Pine64 (2GB RAM) looks like a good deal. It seems more powerful than similarly priced Raspberry Pis (3B 1GB). Is it good for running a small Lemmy instance on?
EDIT: Thanks for the advice all, just bought an 8th gen i3 NUC (4 vCPU, 8GB RAM) to play around with Proxmox and VMs. Going to start off with migrating Home Assistant and then set up a Lemmy instance, and perhaps a static website too.
I am a big fan of “mini desktop” computers for this sort of task (my lemmy instance is running on one). You can usually pick them up used/refurbished for pretty cheap with decent specs: i5 or better processors, upgradeable RAM (SO-DIMM), M.2 or 2.5in SSD. They are quite small, and relatively low power. I have a few in my homelab, and one acting as my media-center PC in my living room.
You’re right, just having one mini-pc with Proxmox and being able scale VMs between applications is a lot better than a collection of sbc’s. I will look at the used market.
I second this. I used to use Raspberry Pis but one mini PC can do so much more and isn’t much more expensive.
Yeah, maybe I was rough on them but I killed like 2 Pis in a year running OpenELEC/LibreELEC (even with heatsinks) before I bought an Nvidia Shield (which was great until Google forced terrible things onto it and Nvidia seemingly stopped supporting it). I grabbed one out of my homelab and I’ve just been running straight Ubuntu on it for about 6 months at this point and wouldn’t dream of going back.
I’ve got a HP ProDesk G5 SSF I bought from eBay for $200, and love it. It’s got a Core i5-9500 which is more than enough power for me. I run a few things on it, like Blue Iris (in a Windows Server 2022 VM) for my security cameras, Home Assistant, Zigbee2mqtt, Node-Red, VictoriaMetrics, and a bunch of others.
Having said that… Depending on how much power it uses and how much power costs in your area, it can sometimes end up cheaper to use a VPS, and you get better enterprise-grade hardware and internet connections. You can get a good VPS for less than $50/year especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on Lowendtalk.com.