I want to set up a home server and take advantage of everything it can offer, specialty privacy.
Raspberry PI, no matter the version, are all quite expensive here in Brazil, so that’s off the table. I’ll go for a regular desktop. But the the requirements for a server that “does it all” remains a mystery to me.
What specs do you guys recommend?
Really the “requirement” is electricity, passed that you’ll need to define “do it all”. I had a desktop with 4 hard drives and 6GB of RAM. Ran containers with Proxmox and it handled most of what I needed (file sharing, Plex, pihole). Then I wanted more, and found an old laptop that has a bad battery and 8GB of RAM1. Installed Proxmox and used containers and ran HomeAssistant and Searx and moved Pihole and Plex to that and turned the Desktop into dedicated storage. Then I wanted more, spent $300 USD on a little mini PC with 32GB of RAM. Now I am running several services (really just for myself) as a mixture of VMs and containers. I still want more, I am hoping to upgrade the RAM in the desktop, and run a backup server directly on my storage.
tldr; you can start with just about anything, but you may always want a bit more
