The main limiter to what you can host is RAM. RPI4s currently go for a premium. Additional they have hidden issues like being picky about power supplies. bottlenecked by IO via USB3 if you want an additional NIC and non-SD storage.

You would be better off with a like-new Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay for ~100 (and occasionally less if you're patient). Supports up to 32GB ram and an M.2 SATA slot.

You'll have much better IO, stability, and capacity compared to RPI4 for not much more cost. Power envelope of the system is pretty similar, the 5070 idles around 5W and loaded down it goes up to ~15W and is fanless which is in the neighborhood of the pi.

I don't know your situation, but can't you use an old PC to start your self-hosting journey?

It's what I did. It costs me less in electricity than a VPS but it's way more powerful.

The only thing I eventually bought was an UPS, because for some reason I regularly have micro power cuts at home.

This is exactly my setup. I build a new desktop from scrath every 5-7 years (upgrading incrementally in between) and my last desktop is now my server. Added 5 pairs of 10tb drives using zfs and the thing is so reliable I sometimes forget I'm hosting it at home.

I have it connected to a small UPS due to the occasional random brown-out in my neighborhood. The server only runs on the UPS for about 15 minutes, but during the rare substantial power outage, that's enough for me to power it down gently.

I also have a little desktop Lenovo PC I found cheap (used) at microcenter that I use as my primary zwave hub with a custom MQTT/JS based home automation script. This replaced a Raspberry Pi, which I loved, but after losing the storage a couple times, I no longer rely upon as a primary server

You can look at Oracle Cloud. They have a "free forever" plan that looks quite nice (4 ARM CPUs, 24 GB RAM and 200 GB storage).

TIL! With those specs it might even be possible to run a k8s cluster

Wow, what's the catch?

The "Always Free Tier" stuff will get shut down when the expanded free tier expires unless you have a credit card plugged in. You can turn it back on... They don't always take cards they should. So, navigating their always free tier is somewhat complicated.

Also, there is a LOT of resource congestion for the arm systems. Be prepared to try every day to fire up new instances for a couple of weeks until you can find free capacity.

You're using an Oracle product ;-)

I bought a second hand Acer chromebox with a celeron and 4GB ram for $15 on ebay (plus another $15 for shipping). It's much more powerful than a pi4 and a lot cheaper too. Plus, it's x86, not arm. I'm running docker swarm on it and using Cloudflare's Argo tunnels.

A Raspberry Pi is the perfect playground to get started with self-hosting. It is cheap and barely takes up any physical space.

Pi-Hole and bitwarden are simple enough applications that you can host both of them on a pi. Plus there are plenty of guides available online to guide you thru the process if you do get stuck.

I got started with self-hosting pi-hole on a raspberry pi myself.

Yes but only a Raspberry Pi 4. The improvement compared to 3 is so big, that it's not worth getting a 3.

And it's nearly impossible to get any of them. I've been trying to buy another 4 with 8 GB for over a year now, but am not willing to go beyond 80 € for just the board.

Pi's are so hard to find. A second hand small form factor (SFF) Dell off eBay is cheaper and more powerful/flexible.

I haven't seen them be mentioned, another good option is to buy a thin client or multiple thin clients.

You can get them on eBay for <$100, they will typically have a fair amount of RAM and a quad-core AMD CPU (enough to outperform a raspberry pi pretty easily), and they will typically be on the order of <20W of power usage, meaning that even running 4-5 of them with k8s/Docker-Swarm won't murder your power bill.

Just an example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154783701325?hash=item2409d3d94d:g:...

You can pretty easily install Ubuntu or something on there and treat it like a normal computer.

My first home server was an old beaten laptop, the CPU was not even 64 bit. Even the current one is assembled of basic office hardware and some HDDs. My suggestion is that you grab the first unused hardware available, and use that.

> What would be a good way to get started?

Rent a Linux server, deploy the Tailscale client, run apps on it.

> should I really self-host on shared CPUs

That shouldn't generally be a problem unless you're a very high value target (or really unlucky), but if you're that worried, rent a bare metal server.

You can pick up an HP MicroServer for around $400 on ebay… this is my plan, as I am also on a tight budget, and burning cash, even a $5/mo Droplet, is just more than I wish to spend.

Bonus, those MicroServers are supported by ESXi, IIRC

I got an ecc-ready used workstation on Ebay. After adding a smallish SSD for the system drive and upgrading the memory to 16GB I think my total cost was in the neighborhood of $200. Cost about as much as two top-end fully-equipped (case, heat sinks, disk) Pi4s, but is much more powerful, and, conveniently, includes space & ports for my SATA spinning-rust bulk storage disks.

It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.

A Pi will run a lot. Next step up is an Intel Nuc. An old one is fine but the newer the better. The 11th gen is rather powerful, but even the 8th is pretty great.

Why not just use a Raspberry Pi? It's cheap and uses almost no power (=very low electricity cost.)