Hey, I want to dip my feet into self-hosting, but i find the hardware side of things very daunting. I want to self host a Minecraft server (shocking, i know), and i’ve actually done this before both on my own PC and through server hosts. I’d like to run a Plex server as well (Jellyfin is champ now it sounds like? So maybe that instead), but I imagine the Minecraft server is going to be the much more intensive side of things, so if it can handle that, plex/jellyfin will be no issue.
The issue is, I can’t seem to find good resources on the hardware side of building a server. I’m finding it very difficult to “map out” what I need, I don’t want to skimp out and end up with something much less powerful than what I need, but i also don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on something extremely overkill. I looked through the sidebar, but it seems to mostly cover the software side of things. Are there any good resources on this?
Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.
Or, see if you can get an old office PC for a couple hundred bucks on eBay. Anything that’s around 5 years old (10 is pushing it) and has decent specs (maybe an i7 and 16GB of RAM) should work fine as a Minecraft and Plex server. Then you can get a cheap (ideally less than $200) graphics card and be good to go.
Bottom line, a “server” is just a PC that’s serving things. You don’t need enterprise grade hardware. If you’re new to hosting, I’d advise you to start cheap and then upgrade to better hardware in a few years when you KNOW what you need. No need to get something really nice and expensive right now.
I have something 10 years old for jellyfin only, (other light stuff too, not important) and it handles it fine. No hardware acceleration but the CPU can keep up for just me and 1 friend using it. I got it for 50 bucks on eBay and it rocks. I don’t know about Minecraft servers though.
Edit: It didn’t come with drives. Don’t ever trust old drives.
It depends on whether or not you’re transcoding, how many users you have, and your resolution. If you’re just direct streaming 720p/1080p content to a couple of people then even a Raspberry Pi is fine. But if you’re sending transcoded 4K streams to several people simultaneously, you need some horsepower.
Might I suggest Server Part Deals for drives? Excellent track record and very responsive. They are my goto for refurbished enterprise drives and have never let me down.
Thanks. I don’t currently have any raid or backup set up, so I should probably do that before it becomes a problem.
Buy yourself a new gaming rig, and use your old gaming rig as a server. That’s what I usually do.
Seconded. A few years ago I upgraded my CPU, which also required me to swap the motherboard and RAM. The old Mobo / CPU / RAM combo was sitting around in my closet. I just bought a decent case, power supply, and a few hard drives, and bam. Instant server.
As far as graphics card, I would go with something cheaper unless you have a specific reason. If your CPU has a built in graphics processor, that’s probably good enough. My CPU didn’t, so I had to throw a $30 card in.
Modded minecraft servers are heavily dependent on single threaded performance. For more vanilla servers paper helps a lot. For forge I highly recommend trying mohist. It isn’t compatible with all forge mods but it works well enough that you can just replace the server jar in many modpacks and see a large performance boost.
The biggest thing that slows down mc servers in my experience is world gen. Pre generating the world and adding a world border can help a lot.
I’ve not done a larger scale fabric server so I can’t offer much advice in optimizing it but the client speed ups available through fabric look very impressive.
If you are running a server without world borders or with a lot of simultaneous players I’d look in depth on what ssd you’re saving the world to. You want dram cache, random write speeds are way more important than sequential. If you can find an Intel optane for cheap they are pretty amazing. The ssd is less important than your cpu and having enough ram to run the server.
Generally an older gaming pc is better than an older server. Again you are targeting single threaded performance. If you are purchasing hardware it might make more sense to go with lower end new hardware than higher end old hardware. It’s all about trade offs for your use case and budget. For a long time I just used my main pc to play games and host servers (ram is cheaper than another pc) but I tinker too much to keep good ‘server’ uptime.
Transcoding can get pretty taxing on a system but any semi modern quad core can handle a few 1080p streams or a 4k stream. Plus you can use a gpu for transcoding. The nice thing is it scales with core count pretty well so older server or workstation hardware works well.
The only thing I’d add to this is that the people who make Paper Minecraft are working on Folia, a multi threaded server. It’s probably worth looking into if you’re starting from scratch :)
Not terribly useful for anything less than a lot of players
Fabric has some amazing open source projects dedicated to performance.
Idk if any multithread it yet but its my current go to for low end systems
Don’t get server hardware, use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll be more than enough for you. Server hardware is way more expensive and won’t be of any advantage. If you’re looking to buy you can even get very good 9-10th gen Intel CPUs and motherboards that are perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. This hardware is also way more power efficient and sometimes even more powerful than any server hardware that you might get for the same price. Get this hardware for cheap and enjoy.
I’ve got enterprise level hardware, rack moubtable all that jazz.
Between the cost of power, and the heat it generates (which uses more AC and thus power) its not feasible to run it.
I’m looking into clustering some raspberry pis for a more power (and heat) efficient hardware as my next project. Barely scratched the surface of research though.
So hey, if anyone has any tips or links, it would be much appreciated.
Just out today, but probably overpriced: https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/10/20/mixtile-cluster-box-supports-four-rockchip-rk3588-sbcs-connected-over-pcie/
Why not get a few HP / Dell mini computers and cluster them? Small, nice and power efficient (because there are models with “mobile” CPUs).
Cost and a personal bias, also I’ve seen more helpful communities amongst Linux and FOSS advocates than trying to deal with a big brand.
I’ve done a lot of IT stuff in my life, even before working in IT.
I’ve seen too many issues from big brands, and its usually caused by the company.
I have a Pi 2 from way back. I’ve thrown so many distros at that thing over time, and without fail I don’t run into any problems I didn’t personally create while learning or through human error.
I understand all too well that those big brands have support for businesses, warranties, etc. It makes them cost effective long term for business. At a personal level I just don’t see the benefits outweighing the negatives.
Again, personal bias. Same core reason I avoid apple products, bias, though I mainly dislike apples cost combined with their closed off, well, everything.
Yes but ARM is great but compared to server hardware it is shit when it comes to performance and reliability. If you come from server hardware and you really max it out you’re going to have a poor experience.
Also I personally like to avoid the Raspberry Pi and their stuff as much as possible. They’ve done good things for the community however they’ve some predatory tactics and shenanigans that aren’t cool. Here a few examples of what people usually fail to see:
- Requires a special tool to flash. In the past it was all about getting a image and using etcher, dd or wtv to flash it into a card, now they’re pushing people to use Raspberry Pi Imager. Without it you won’t be able to easily disable telemetry and/or login via network out of the box;
- Includes telemetry;
- No alternative open Debian based OS such as Armbian (only the Ubuntu variant);
- Raspberry Pi 5 finally has PCI. But instead of doing what was right they decided to include some proprietary bullshit connector that requires yet another board made by them. For those who are unware other SBC manufacturers simply include a standard PCI slot OR a standard NVME M2 slot. Both great option as hardware for them is common and cheap;
- It is overpriced and behind times.
For what’s worth the NanoPi M4 released in 2018 with a RK3399 already had a PCI interface, 4GB of RAM and whatnot and was cheaper than the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ from the same year that had Ethernet shared with the USB bus.
If you don’t want those big brands (I only suggested them because they’re cheap second hand) build something yourself on consumer hardware or pick a Chinese brand.
Those big brands are cheap though, for 100€ you can get an HP Mini with an i5 8th gen + 16GB of ram + 256GB NVME that obviously has a case, a LOT of I/O, PCI (m2) comes with a power adapter and more importantly it outperforms a RPi5 in all possible ways. Note that the RPi5 8GB of ram will cost you 80€ + case + power adapter + bullshit pci adapter + sd card + whatever else money grab.
Side not on alternative brands, HP mini units are reliable the BIOS is good and things work. Now the trendy MINISFORUM is cool however their BIOS come out of the factory with wired bugs and the hardware isn’t as reliable - missing ESD protection on USB in some models and whatnot.
Performance isn’t key. But I like performance, lol. I also wasn’t aware of their more recent practices. So thank you.
I’ll have to check out the HP mini. As I said, just barely scratched the surface on researching this, and its more of a thought than a project at the moment, lol.
I just can’t afford (and cool) enterprise level stuff at home. It was free (to me) so no big loss other than buying a better CPU used ~50 bucks. I’ve spent more on worse ideas lol.
I was just trying to share a bit of my experience, I too have datacenter / server hardware experience and have dealt with a ton of mini computers and those ARMs and Chinese brands aren’t what one usually expects at the most fundamental details.
Hardware wise, you just need a good PC. One thing to note is that graphics are almost irrelevant for servers. In your case, it would help to have AV1 encoding, so you could go with a $110 Intel A380 or A310.
The most important thing is RAM. The more server applications you start putting on there, the more RAM you’ll need. 16GB is fine for what you need right now, but make sure your mobo has two extra slots so you can up it to 32 if needed.
Storage, it’s really up to you. If you want everything on an NVMe, great! If you want everything in a RAID array, expensive, but great! Using mdadm for RAID arrays is fairly easy, just a lot of reading. Make sure you have enough SATA ports to support all the disks you need if you want that.
CPU, avoid ones with integrated graphics to save cost. Unless you’re buying one that does AV1 encoding, then you don’t need the A380.
deleted by creator
I don’t have any better hardware suggestions than you’ve already been given, but I would recommend avoiding Plex.
I get problems with it pretty much every day. Usually it’s the client stuttering and crashing, but I often get the client connecting to the server, but not getting a list of media back.
I’ve bought a lifetime licence, but I’m looking into switching to Jellyfin because it’s so frustrating.
I’ve gone with Unraid and consumer level hardware (intel i3 12100 and 16gb of standard ddr4 ram) the only “server hardware” I have, is an LSI HBA card that’s in IT mode so I can connect more HDDs.
I’m even used SMR drives in my array, just use a good CMR drive for parity and the biggest SSD you can get for your cache drive and you will be good to go.
There are a few things I’d consider:
- How many users are going to be on the MC server? MC is pretty notorious for eating RAM, and since most of my home server adventures often includes multiple VMs, I would look for something with at least 32 gb of ram.
- for plex (I’m guessing similar is going to be the case for Jellyfin) how many users do you expect to support concurrently, and how good are you at downloading in formats that the clients support direct play for? Most remote plex users are going to require transcoding because of bandwidth limits, but if you have direct play for most of your local clients or have a good upload and don’t have to transcode 3+ streams at a time, you’re probably fine with just about anything from the last 10 years in terms of CPU.
- also re: plex, do you have any idea in terms of storage requirements? Again, if you’re just getting started < 10 tb of storage in mind, you can get by with most computers.
Anyway, to give you an idea, I run both of these and quite a few other things besides on a Dell R710 I bought like 4 years ago and never really have any issue.
My suggestion would be grab basically any old computer laying around or hit up eBay for some ~$100-$200 used server (be careful about 1u’s or rack mounts in general if noise is a concern, you can get normal tower-case servers as well) and start by running your services on that. That’s probably just about what all of us have done at some point. Honestly, your needs are pretty slim unless you’re talking about hosting those services for hundreds of people, but if you’re just hosting for you and a few friends or immediate family, pretty much any any computer will do.
I wanted to keep things very budget conscious, so I have the r710 paired with a rackable 3016 jbod bay. The r710 and the rackable were both about $200, and then I had to buy an HBA card to connect them, so another $90 there. The r710 has 64 gb of ram and I think dual Xeons plus 8 2.5" slots. The rackable is 16 3.5" slots, so what this means is I basically don’t have to decommission drives until they die. I run unRAID on the server, which also means that I can easily get a decent level of protection for drive failure, and I don’t have to worry about matching up drives and all that. I put a couple of cheap SSDs in the 710 for cache drives and to run things I wanted to be a little more performant (MC server, though tbh I never really had an issue running it on spinning disks) and this setup has been more or less rock solid for about 5 years now hosting these services for about 10 people.
You don’t need to buy server hardware, although it is nice. Depending on where you live you might be able to buy some decent second hand server hardware.
If it was me, I would buy new desktop hardware. Here is a fairly decent server that will do almost anything: Go for around 16 or 24 core CPU with high Ghz per core. 64GB or 128GB DDR5 RAM. Your most important factor will be storage speed. Go with NVMe drives. You have some choices here. JBOD: One or more independent M.2 key drives. Software RAID: Use your CPU to manage the RAID configuration. Hardware RAID: Use a RAID controller HBA card to manage the RAID (faster but single point of failure). Use RAID 1 for data protection (can lose one drive and still have all your data), RAID 0 (double the speed of your drives), RAID 10 (best of both but needs double the drives). Choose a motherboard that suits your choices.
Things to take into account: If you go with a RAID controller card, make sure that the PCIe lanes it uses can take the full speed of your RAID configuration or you might be bottlenecked there. Choosing an Intel or AMD CPU doesn’t make much difference. If you are not good with linux distros and don’t want a learning curve, stick with something like Ubuntu LTS 22.04 server. You most likely won’t need any graphics card, but it depends what you want to do.
You can run a minecraft server on an old laptop, so these specs might be overkill, I just put what I would get and it will do almost anything you want to do with it. An 8 core CPU, 16GB RAM, with 1 NVMe drive will also be capable of all your described needs just fine.
It really kinda depends on what type of Minecraft server you’re running. I was running Plex and Minecraft on unRaid with like 16gigs of ram and an i3 8100 and it was fine until I started doing more intense moded Minecraft. The iGPU in Intel processors can handle transcoding really well so it’s a pretty good all in one solution. I imagine if you’re going to heavily modded Minecraft you could probably get away with a current gen i5 or maybe even i3 if you’re on a budget. Looks like the i3 13100 has hyper threading and my old 8100 didn’t. Not sure how big of a difference it would make.
Lots of choices for sure. I haven’t built a PC in years but I’d start with looking at the requirements for the Minecraft & Jellyfin server, maybe shoot a bit higher to future-proof the build, then browse PC part picker builds to find combos that have worked well for others?
Best of luck to you.
1ct KAMRUI Mini PC Intel N5105 Windows 11 Pro 8GB RAM 256GB SSD WIFI6 4K Dual LAN (proxmox arbiter and also this will run your pfsense/opensense firewall vm/appliance)
2ct UM350 Mini PC 16 GB RAM 512 GB PCIe SSD AMD Ryzen 5 3550H Mini Computers (both of these will be the prox 2 and prox3 worker nodes)
Buffalo TS5410DN1604 TeraStation (NAS)
1ct Cisco Catalyst WS-C3650-24PS-S 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch TESTED
All of that together with the Buy it now options are around $1000 USD total with shipping. That Buffalo NAS will need 3.5" drives. So add that to the cost.
Removed by mod
Same for me
Decent older servers (e.g., Dell Poweredge) can be had off of Craigslist/FB Marketplace pretty cheaply (~$300-$400).
just get a synology?
Way too expensive, and not what they need.
To run Minecraft and Plex? That’s not really the ideal use case for a Synology…
