I keep seeing this question come up when people are thinking about starting a home server: what should I buy?
My honest answer is: probably nothing, at least not yet. Start with whatever you have.
The machine I’m running#
It’s a Dell Latitude E6430, a 2013 business laptop I picked up cheap when my previous company was clearing out old hardware. It had already been upgraded over the years: 8GB of dual channel RAM, a 240GB SSD for the OS, and the CD drive swapped out for a caddy mounting the original 320GB HDD as a data drive. So by the time I repurposed it as a server, the hardware was already in decent shape.
Specs:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-3320M
- RAM: 8GB DDR3 dual channel
- Storage: 240GB SSD (OS) + 320GB HDD (data, via caddy)
The screen is ugly, but it runs headless so it doesn’t matter. It’s still there if I ever need to plug in and do something directly, which is occasionally useful.
I wiped it, installed Ubuntu, and started. Setting up Ubuntu and getting Docker running was actually fun, more than I expected.
Starting with a desktop, then going headless#
I actually started with Ubuntu Desktop, not the server edition. Early on that was genuinely useful. Unzipping the Google Takeout files, uploading photos to Koofr through a browser, getting familiar with the setup while having a GUI to fall back on. Having a desktop environment made those first few days easier.
Once things were stable and I understood what I was doing, I removed GNOME and snapd entirely and set the machine to boot into text mode only. No display manager, no desktop. Everything managed over SSH or through a browser pointed at whatever service I needed.
That freed up about 1GB of RAM, which matters when you’re running multiple containers on 8GB.
If you’re starting out, Ubuntu Desktop is a perfectly reasonable choice. You can always strip it back later once you don’t need it anymore.
Where do you actually put it#
I’d been overthinking this before I started. I had this vague image of a rack or at least a dedicated shelf somewhere. Turns out it’s a laptop. Lid closed, it’s basically just a thick book. You can tuck it anywhere with a power outlet. In my case it also needed to be near the router for the ethernet cable, so it just sits in a corner near the network cabinet. It’s not glamorous. It looks like I forgot a laptop in the corner. But it’s been running 24/7 for days, so.
What specs actually matter (it depends)#
It really comes down to what you want to run.
Storage matters most if you’re dealing with photos, videos, or backups. More capacity, more redundancy. Speed matters less, you’re not serving a data centre.
RAM adds up with Docker containers, but not as fast as you’d think. Most lightweight services barely use anything. AdGuard Home for example will run on practically anything, including a Raspberry Pi. Immich needs a bit more headroom for its AI processing, but any reasonably modern laptop handles it fine. 8GB is comfortable for a moderate number of services.
CPU is mostly irrelevant at idle. The exception is transcoding — if you’re planning to run Plex or Jellyfin and want it to transcode video on the fly, you’ll want something with more grunt. That’s probably the one workload where an old laptop might genuinely struggle.
For what I’m running (Immich, WireGuard, AdGuard, backups, a few utilities), the 2013 laptop with an i5 is way more than enough. With all services running, it idles at around 1.9GB of RAM used out of 8GB and 1-2% CPU. I didn’t expect it to be this light.
Should you buy something new?#
Only if you’ve already proved the project is worth it to you.
Run it on whatever you have first. An old laptop, an old desktop, a spare machine, all viable. There’s something genuinely satisfying about taking a device that’s been sitting in a drawer for years and giving it a purpose. You’ll quickly learn what the actual constraints are for your usage, and experimenting on hardware you already own means there’s nothing to lose. Then, if you want to upgrade, you’ll know exactly what you’re buying and why.
If you don’t have anything spare, it’s worth renting a cheap VPS for a month or two just to tinker. You get a real Linux server, you learn what you actually want to run, and you spend a few dollars instead of buying hardware for a hobby you’re not sure about yet.
The answer to “what hardware do I need?” is almost always: less than you think, and probably something you already own.