Advice for Setting Up a Beginner Home Server (Pi-hole, Home Assistant, Immich, etc.)

S

sghulyani

Beginner
Hi everyone,

I'm just starting to get into the world of home servers and self-hosted apps, and I’d really appreciate some guidance. I’m definitely not an expert — just experimenting and trying to learn as I go.

I'm planning to run services like:
  • Pi-hole or AdGuard Home (haven’t decided yet)
  • Home Assistant
  • Paperless-ngx
  • Immich
  • Tandoor Recipes
  • Possibly a few more apps down the line
I’m not currently planning to run a full-blown media server (using Stremio for now), but it might be nice to have that option in the future.

I’m mainly looking for advice on:
  1. Hardware specs:
    What kind of CPU, RAM, and storage would be good enough for this kind of setup? I’m trying to keep power usage and costs low, but don’t want to under-provision either. Would N100 be enough or would i need something more powerful? Not looking at Pi since Pi5 is anyways close to a mini-PC in terms of pricing and a bit underpowered comparatively. Budget is around INR 20,000.
  2. Where to buy hardware:
    Any recommended places to procure affordable, reliable hardware? I’m based in Bangalore. Would Skullsaints from Amazon be ok? Or would procuring from a local vendor would be better?
Thanks in advance for any tips or setups you'd be willing to share. Excited to join the self-hosting community!
 
Stay away from Rpi. N100 is sufficient. Use adguardhome instead of pihole. Run homeassistant in a vm with hassos and use another vm with portainer for everything else. I'll get 16gb minimum, more if budget permits
 
Hardware specs:
all the services you mentioned can be run on fairly low hardware except immich and media server.

Immich - runs a machine learning model to detect & identify faces as well as cluster them to find the faces of the same person. This is a async job which can still be done on a low power cpu and does not impact your user experience much.

Media Server - these are super performance hungry once you have to transcode media. If you don't know whether you need to transcode, assume you need to transcode.
A low power cpu will hamper your experience here if it cannot transcode a video as you're watching it, there will be buffering.


Also, I will recommend not to go with mini pcs or raspberry pi. They provide a one time convenience and limit your upgrades. Go with a standard cabinet and consumer grade cpus, mobo etc. There are always parts you can swap out and upgrade you need to including the cpu and motherboard. There are parts that can be re-used or upgraded like the cabinet itself, psu, hard drives, gpu etc. You will be able to create this setup for similar costs as a mini pc
 
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demon_slayer said:
Also, I will recommend not to go with mini pcs or raspberry pi. They provide a one time convenience and limit your upgrades. Go with a standard cabinet and consumer grade cpus, mobo etc. There are always parts you can swap out and upgrade you need to including the cpu and motherboard. There are parts that can be re-used or upgraded like the cabinet itself, psu, hard drives, gpu etc. You will be able to create this setup for similar costs as a mini pc
Click to expand...
In my opinion USFF / 1L machines make a lot of sense, especially for beginners.
  • Space is a big deal, and these take up way less room while still getting the job done. Also they’re easy to set up, super portable, and way cheaper if you grab them from the used market.
  • Except for PCI support, rest of upgrades are possible ( ram , storage , CPU for 1L PC is possible too ).
  • One big advantage is ability to expand the cluster by adding more units instead of swapping out parts; without worrying about the space
  • Only caveat is GPU, but with an oculink that can be taken care of.

PS : @sghulyani - If you want to go for full size, I will be putting up - i7 6700k + z170 sabertooth mark 1+ 24gb + CM v650 psu + hyper 212x + CM 690 ii for sale by weekend.
 
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I am self-hosting all the services you listed plus a few more. Tried Proxmox and found it not suitable for me. Everything is docker. Initially was using Debian 12 but since 2 years moved to fedora server for bleeding edge packages.
I got a used dell OptiPlex 7050 i5 6500+16GB RAM. got 6TB seagate nas drive from a fellow member. It is more than capable for everything that I throw at it. Avoid RPi.
 
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mk76 said:
In my opinion USFF / 1L machines make a lot of sense, especially for beginners.
  • Space is a big deal, and these take up way less room while still getting the job done. Also they’re easy to set up, super portable, and way cheaper if you grab them from the used market.
  • Except for PCI support, rest of upgrades are possible ( ram , storage , CPU for 1L PC is possible too ).
  • One big advantage is ability to expand the cluster by adding more units instead of swapping out parts; without worrying about the space
  • Only caveat is GPU, but with an oculink that can be taken care of.

PS : @sghulyani - If you want to go for full size, I will be putting up - i7 6700k + z170 sabertooth mark 1+ 24gb + CM v650 psu + hyper 212x + CM 690 ii for sale by weekend.
Click to expand...
I don't think practically, the space matters too much. The surface area difference is similar, ad it's more about the height. I guess I see it as a piece of hardware I can leave in some corner rather than somewhere it is visible or obstructs my usable space.

Also, for the upgrades part, I think another place where the minipcs suffer is adding more hard drives when the user needs to. In a cabinet, it's basically buy and install. For a minipc, I think it's more involved as you need to get a enclosure or rely on wonky usb connections.
 
Hardware:

For immich, I definitely suggest getting i5 8th gen or newer if you have more than 2 users and plan to use it for regular backups (not just archiving)
So that you can use its very capable igpu for encoding, ML and face detection.
Otherwise the experience won't be as smooth. N100 for me was too weak.
If you plan to use plex/jellyfin down the line, this decision will become crucial.


Software:

If data backup/redundancy/resiliency is not crucial, or you have your storage elsewhere, proxmox is the best.
In all other cases, get TrueNas + apps / Alpine VM for docker - based apps.


I am using the above setup for a year now with almost zero issues. Easy to maintain (I no longer have to spend my weekends just getting things working the way they should.

One more suggestion: UPS is MUST!
 
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demon_slayer said:
I don't think practically, the space matters too much. The surface area difference is similar, ad it's more about the height. I guess I see it as a piece of hardware I can leave in some corner rather than somewhere it is visible or obstructs my usable space.
Click to expand...
Unless one has ample space at disposal; size does matter. And running a cluster with bigger units makes it even more difficult.
1748254763002.png

In similar sizing, can build a rack with multiple units https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/project-mini-rack-compact-and-portable-homelabs

demon_slayer said:
Also, for the upgrades part, I think another place where the minipcs suffer is adding more hard drives when the user needs to. In a cabinet, it's basically buy and install. For a minipc, I think it's more involved as you need to get a enclosure or rely on wonky usb connections.
Click to expand...
For storage expansion, can use m2 to multi-sata for. Albeit the enclosure would need a modding.
1748254357794.png



Options are there. It all comes to personal preference.
 
TrexTom said:
I am self-hosting all the services you listed plus a few more. Tried Proxmox and found it not suitable for me. Everything is docker. Initially was using Debian 12 but since 2 years moved to fedora server for bleeding edge packages.
I got a used dell OptiPlex 7050 i5 6500+16GB RAM. got 6TB seagate nas drive from a fellow member. It is more than capable for everything that I throw at it. Avoid RPi.
Click to expand...
what issues you had with proxmox?
 
TrexTom said:
I am self-hosting all the services you listed plus a few more. Tried Proxmox and found it not suitable for me. Everything is docker. Initially was using Debian 12 but since 2 years moved to fedora server for bleeding edge packages.
I got a used dell OptiPlex 7050 i5 6500+16GB RAM. got 6TB seagate nas drive from a fellow member. It is more than capable for everything that I throw at it. Avoid RPi.
Click to expand...
Why proxmox is not suitable because I am using proxmox no issues got yet. Also any reason to Avoid RPi? If you have you can utilise on your network.
 
DigitalDude said:
what issues you had with proxmox?
Click to expand...
For me, the learning curve was the issue. I have a perfectly running environment for my homelab and didn't have time to experiment with it. I will surely give it a try in the future.
Safcr7 said:
Why proxmox is not suitable because I am using proxmox no issues got yet. Also any reason to Avoid RPi? If you have you can utilise on your network.
Click to expand...
I have Rpi 3 and it is not good for media server as it does not have powerful CPU, but for things like DNS server, Home VPN, IOT monitoring it is ok.
 
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TrexTom said:
For me, the learning curve was the issue. I have a perfectly running environment for my homelab and didn't have time to experiment with it. I will surely give it a try in the future.

I have Rpi 3 and it is not good for media server as it does not have powerful CPU, but for things like DNS server, Home VPN, IOT monitoring it is ok.
Click to expand...
That's correct RPI is not suitable for Media server just for DNS server Monitoring pi hole etc.
 
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