Nivel 0
The box you already have
The best first server is the one you did not buy.
A machine on all day that strips the ads from your WHOLE house (the phone, the TV, your mum's tablet) without installing anything on any of them. It is the first service anybody notices and the one that hooks you.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Put plainly: if you buy, I earn a commission and it costs you nothing extra. How it works
- What you put on it
- Debian with no desktop, or Raspberry Pi OS. AdGuard Home or Pi-hole on top.
- Spending order
- Nothing, if you have an old machine. Around $80 to $160 if you start with a Raspberry Pi.
What you keep even if you sell the hardware
What you learn at this level
- What a fixed IP address is and why your router keeps changing it on things.
- What DNS actually does, which is the piece of the internet most people use without ever hearing its name.
- Getting into a computer with no monitor, over SSH, from another one.
- That a service going down leaves the whole house without internet, and that this is why you learn to fix it fast.
And now, what with
The parts
These come last on purpose: first what for, then what with. The price ranges are there to give your wallet a sense of scale, not to be believed — the real price is what you see when you open the link.
A used office mini: Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny or Dell OptiPlex Micro
This is the path the community recommends today, over the Raspberry Pi, and the reason is blunt: they are x86, so they run any Docker image, Proxmox and ZFS without recompiling anything — which on ARM is not guaranteed. They come out of offices used for very little money, with 4 to 8 threads, expandable memory and room for two drives. Look in refurbished shops too, not only on Amazon.
Price range: MX$1,500 – MX$4,000 usado
Raspberry Pi 5, 8 GB
Raspberry Pi
It is still valid and it draws 5 watts. Today a used office mini costs about the same, has more muscle and will not leave you stuck the day a program does not exist for ARM.
Price range: MX$2,000 – MX$3,000
High-endurance microSD, 64 GB
Kingston
Ordinary microSDs burn out in a server: it writes logs around the clock. The «high endurance» ones are made for security cameras, which do exactly that.
Price range: MX$300 – MX$500
Official 27 W USB-C power supply
Raspberry Pi
The phone charger you have lying around is NOT enough. Half an hour of strange faults before working out it was the power supply is the most common rite of passage there is.
Price range: MX$300 – MX$500
Cat 6 network cable
Wired, not wifi. A DNS server on unstable wifi feels like slow internet and you never suspect it.
Price range: MX$100 – MX$200
When this gets too small for you
Nivel 1: Your files are yours again