I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I’m only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I’m not sure of the best bang for my buck. I’d like good, long-term performance, but I don’t really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I’m thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?
A grand?? You can pick up a used Lenovo Tiny for 50 bucks (US) on EBay.
In europe, viavle options start at 200€ (imo). If your use case outgrows one lenovo tiny (which is unlikely since you’re coming from a pi), you can buy more / other tiny pcs / a desktop pc / a server rack and put proxmox on everything for running services inside a cluster.
You can get a decent Lenovo Tiny for 75€ + 10€ IMO. On eBay.
Like some 2-4 core 4-8GB 120-240GB SSD. Blasts a hole in any SOC like the raspberry.