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Where is low end hardware??
I am going to upgrade my home internet to 1gbps plan in a few months... This way I can save some money by running server from home.
Is there a low end hardware website? What do most providers do with old hardware?
I am not looking for bulk hardware! just a single server at a really good discount.
Not going to buy right now though, just trying to figure out where the best place to find budget server hardware is for future reference.
Comments
Given rising electricity prices, will you really save money?
Yea, you are probably right, I've never owned a server from home. So I wasn't sure how much power it would pull.
I'm guessing providers are paying the DCs less for power that you're paying your utlities provider. Cheap old/lowend hardware is I guess more likely to be inefficient in terms of power use unless you know what you're looking for, so maybe there's a false economy in your plan - I'm sure you can make it work out cheaper in the end, you just need to be careful.
It outputs the energy in heat. Dosent really matter
Depends what hardware you use. Not too old CPUs are really energy efficient, even more so at idle. With a decent PSU (saving money going for a cheap / low efficiency PSU is not saving money, in the long run!) and an SSD a home server can consume as little as 15-20w (and more when doing CPU intensive tasks). Even less if no CPU power is needed and a small arm board can be enough: a cubietruck with a 2.5 HDD will use around 5W. Not much! And there would be enough power to keep a 1Gbs line busy with the right setup...
If you're talking about 1U/2U etc, don't. Just don't. Power is one thing, noise is another, have you heard how loud rack servers can get? I had a few in my basement and still could hear them once in a while.
This is the specs I was looking for since it's $245, but I wasn't sure anymore since people started to mention power and noise which I didn't even take into consideration when I made this post.
Used servers don't cost much to begin with. But the issue with them are those 40mm fans. There are a few after market ones like Noctua but they aren't the cheapest option and quite frankly I've not tried them if they even make any notable difference.
Heat and power are also a big factor.
Some people do like false saving options (example: bank accounts with 0.01% is definitely one of option as inflation rate is above 6%), plenty of eBay sellers went bust as trading ultra cheap will not generate any profit 😂😂
Just something to consider if your not looking for heavy cpu power:
Some of these mini micros would make good low power boxes at home.
Thanks, this is pretty interesting. Now time to see how much these are locally
A Ryzen NUC can be found online for under $500, and it will outperform that X5650
Its a beast of a machine, and your power bill will not go insane.
This CPU is 12 years old. Smartphones outperform it.
Waste of power and money. E5 v2 is lowest you should go if you will use heat as house heating or you have reeaaaally cheap power (or colo for cheap, but in this case you want to do it in home). If not its a lot better to snatch used Ryzen like 3600 for a little bit more. A lot faster, less power.
Ryzens with common parts in ATX case make a lot of sense for home lab. 1U rack server doesnt - too much noise and lack of upgrade path in most cases (especially with that x5650. with ryzen 3600 you can install never generation cpu like 5600X, get PCIE 4.0...)
Yah try ebay or even facebook marketplace... The AMDs are the better ones to find as they bench better vs the intel counterparts. You should be able to find some for ~300-400
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=lenovo+mini+amd
It's hard offer sensible advice without knowing your situation, needs, and plans.
That said, either use a tiny box without fans or use a 2HU rack server if you need that kind of power, but be sure to chose your processor wisely The difference between say dual 2.8+GHz 26xxv2 and dual (or if sufficient single) say 35W or 45W processor(s) will become painfully clear quickly when your electricity bill arrives ...
AMD Zen, as suggested by some, is indeed a good choice - theoretically that is, because for the difference in price between an Zen (Epyc or Ryzen) system and a second hand intel system you'll easily pay the difference in electricity bill for some years (plus obviously the front up cost is much higher while the power saving will trickle down slowly).
If you don't need lots of (computing) power and if a single SSD drive (plus a sata drive) is good enough you might want to have a look at a pcengines solution. Those are typically used for (quite beefy) firewalls but of course one can as well install linux or a BSD and use them as server. I have one with a (older) 4 cores AMD processor, 4 GB memory and more ethernet ports (incl. 1 Gb/s) ports than I need but IIRC they also offer that board with only 2 ports. For around €200 you'll get the "main board" incl. processor and memory (not soldered down but freely exchangable), a (external) small power supply and even a small (metal) case and IIRC it even has an USB3 port which I mostly use for external 2 disks Raid 1 backup for the internal single SSD. Computing power of course isn't great (but neither measly) but should be good enough for most "I run my site (and maybe an email server too) from home" use cases.
If you are interested I'm willing to benchmark my box and put it into context with e.g. a 26xxv2 box.
That's ancient hardware I would spend a little bit more and get something that has better performance and less power consumption.
I would only take such a machine if I got it for free basically, otherwise it's not worth it.
Also probably better not to run any 1u server at home as they're really noisy generally unless you've got some dedicated space for it. I use a dual e5 v3 64gb ddr4 for my personal projects found some really cheap colo in Sweden where I live paying only about 30 euros/month
Hey there!
Before investing in costly and bulky hardware, make a solid plan with all the pros and cons of owning a server at your own home. If not done properly, the whole plan could backfire, resulting in a total waste of resources.
Thanks everyone! My friend advised me to buy raspberry pi 4 to host some stuff at home and use a small vps for other stuff. It's not ideal, but I can do it. The stores listed on the raspberry pi 4 website seem to be out of stock. I can buy it on some sites, but they are double the price. Is this common for raspberry pi's?
I'd recommend a board with a SATA port. That way you can have a real HDD or SSD, which will be much better than an SD card + having to rely on USB.
It depends what kind usage, If you just self-hosted some application. I'd recommended got AMD Athlon 3000g and stick with x86 you can use various distro linux than using ARM.
I bought parts on local Polish auction site (Allegro) and ordered a motherboard from Aliexpress.
I am not sure if this is a real low-end server, but I am very satisfied of this build...
Look for stores with used server parts. With this approach I didn't spend too much on such specs:
Intel Xeon E5-2660v2
48GB RAM DDR3-ECC REG
Dell Intel Network Card (I don't remember which one, compatible with ESXi)
AXAGON PCIe HW RAID Controller (with its own BIOS)
4x480GB SSD Disks (Crucial)
Motherboard - Jingsha X79P
The only new parts on this server were: motherboard, SSDs and RAID controller
I assembled this server in Aug 2020, working all the time, non stop.
Yea, they go through cycles and there will be a point when a new model comes out and the old models will be sold on sales.
But if you're not buying a server for now, and you have no particular need/use at the moment, what's the rush?
Check out Xbyte. They have refurbished servers.
Just some math to consider:
A typical dual Intel E5-2660v2 server with 128gb ram and some storage is going to utilize 1.5 amps @ 120 vac at idle and around 2.5 amps at load. So let's just call it a 2 amp box for ease of math.
Most homes in the US pay around 12 cents per KWH for their electricity.
2 amps @ 120vac = 240 watts = .24 KW
.24 KW * 720 hours per month = 172.8 KWH * .12 = $20.73
So you are paying $20.73/month in electricity to run that server at home.
This does not account for additional air conditioning load in your if you live in a warm climate. People who run these types of servers at home know that it's effectively a 200 watt lightbulb burning constantly and that creates some heat.
Add in the overhead and the server is probably $25/month.
Something to think about!
If the raspberry PI is $25+ that's at least 8 years of low-end $3/year shared hosting right there.
My advice, don't host a server at home. Cost of electricity. If you share the server and someone does something wrong, you might have law enforcement in your house. Also, many cheap options available with features like DDOS protection from providers here etc. Server hardware failure would cost you money if you owned the server etc etc etc.
I am running my old laptop as server, it uses like 2$ a month in electricity. And that is in Poland where electricity is not that cheap
Chip shortage go brrrr
I thought we had an agreement
About what