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’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.