easymode

My fiancee and I are finally settled in enough to our new place that I'm getting antsy and wanting to make changes to my selfhost setup.

When I first started, I used an old desktop PC that had been lying around for years, and installed Debian on it. I had gotten in over my head and now I'm running everything off of a Supermicro server that's at my mother-in-law's place. I'm wanting to downgrade to a smaller system simply because my setup is overkill at the moment, but I'm unsure of how I want to downgrade.

My wishlist is pretty small at the moment; a NAS to download and serve files around the house and a Jellyfin server for serving movies and TV shows to friends and family, as well as at home. Maybe some small virtualization here and there.

What's your setup, and how did you get started? What changes have you made and why?

Right now I have a HP Z2 G4 tower with 2 10TB HDDs. All it's hosting is my Plex server and then Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, SABnzbd and qBittorrent. Originally this was setup in an older Dell Optiplex but a power outage killed that PC so I got the HP and moved over the SSD with the OS and the HDDs in it and it booted up and kept working lol. It is running Windows because that's what I set it up with like 8 years ago and I just haven't found the motivation to move it over to Linux.

This is probably cursed but I just run it all from my main rig running Debian...I keep regular backups and my main pc remains on 24\7 unless I'm doing maintenance, so it seems ok so far and my power bill hasnt increased much at all, still much cheaper than when someone in my household was on 24/7 oxygen. I'm sure there's better ways to do it all but it works for me.

For software, I just use jellyfin for slinging media and copyparty for other filesharing tasks. On the back-end I've got everything hooked together via tailscale. It works and I leave it alone.

Mines basically my old gaming PC with a bunch of 4 TB HDD's I added in:

i7-9700k
32GB DDR4
2 x 4TB HDD (1 is used as a parity disk) - Data storage
1 x 2TB HDD - Seeding stuff
1 x 1TB SSD - Cache drive
1 x 32GB Flash Drive for the OS
1 x 1TB External SSD for backups

For the OS i'm running Unraid with the following dockers:
- AdGuard-Home (ad-blocking)
- Deluge (torrent client)
- nginx (hosting my own startpage)
- freshRSS (rss feeds)
- JellyFin (media server)
- JellySeerr (jellyfin request thingy (wife loves it))

Overkill really for my needs, Unraid has been solid i've used it for years and years at this point.

@the_skotts Sounds similar to my old setup, but I've never ran Windows on my servers. Are you running Windows Server or is it just a plain old Windows desktop installation?

For some reason I always get nervous talking about *arr stacks online, but I've got qBittorrent running alongside Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/Prowlarr. Eventually looking to get the *arr stack off of Docker, but it works for now. Proxmox has nice for virtualization and does what I need it to do.

@mega Hadn't heard of Seer. I'm gonna have to look into this soon; one of my biggest pains is users not being able to put in their requests. I also gotta look into some ad-blocking for home.

bumbervevo wrote: Mar 17th, '26, 16:05 @the_skotts Sounds similar to my old setup, but I've never ran Windows on my servers. Are you running Windows Server or is it just a plain old Windows desktop installation?

It's just regular old Windows. The biggest downside I've ran into with running Windows is that Plex doesn't start up until you login (I know there's ways to run Plex as a server, but last I saw that breaks hardware acceleration) so I had to setup an account to autologin and then I have a scheduled task that runs at login to lock the computer. It's a little janky but it works lol

the_skotts wrote: Mar 17th, '26, 16:14 It's just regular old Windows. The biggest downside I've ran into with running Windows is that Plex doesn't start up until you login (I know there's ways to run Plex as a server, but last I saw that breaks hardware acceleration) so I had to setup an account to autologin and then I have a scheduled task that runs at login to lock the computer. It's a little janky but it works lol

A little bit of jank is essential to every server I feel like. Mine has jank all over the place though. It's pretty debilitating...

I found a custom NAS on Marketplace that I'm hopefully picking up tomorrow to replace my Supermicro server. It's only $150 and comes with a 7th-gen i5 and 8GB RAM with a neat-looking 3D-printed case. If things go well, I should be able to post more about it this weekend.

I've got an old Thinkpad with the battery yanked out running Proxmox. Right now it has 2 Debian lxcs with different services like Adguard Home, BentoPDF, Syncthing, etc. It's pretty nice just for hosting some services. At some point in the future (whenever that would be) I'd love to upgrade to a proper computer with storage and such. I had an external drive I was using for ages but it finally kicked the bucket. Rip 8tb of media and backups lol.

An old sans-battery Dell laptop with external SSDs juiced in, running Rockstor NAS (based on OpenSUSE) with a Jellyfin server and I'm about to run Nginx for webhosting. I don't have a selfhosted cloud so much as I just copy stuff from the NAS via SFTP when necessary.

Right now I'm running things on a HP Compaq 8200, this pc:

For now I'm hosting Calibre, Immich, FreshRSS and a Plex server that I use with my family. Everything is working great but I was thinking on moving everything to my main rig as @Casey did mostly to get advantage of the GPU.