I always had an interest in servers and server hardware. I have been building servers for a long time now and I have a lot of experience with a lot of hardware. I will list some of my personal favorites in my home lab.
For a list of server providers I use, check out my server providers post.
This server is used to backup my files from my others servers and my laptop and desktop, using roughly around 6tb of storage. The hard drives are a bit old but this server is also getting backed up to spare hdds I have bought. Most of this is done through magic, crontabs and rsync.
The specs are a bit outdated but this server is build with parts from my last computer. It’s not runnning 24/7 and I only turn it on to backup everything in my home.
I bought a Dell Poweredge R410 for around 150 Euros on marketplace. It came with the following specs but as of now its collecting dust in my closet. It is loud and consumes a lot of power. I will probably use it for something else in the future. I don’t recomend getting a r410 unless you can put in a different room. I used this server as a KVM server running various VM’s. Mainly used for testing proxmox and other hypervisors.
It might sound a bit silly to consider a Raspberry pi 4 a server but with its low power consuption it is an ideal VPN and PiHole server for my needs. I use the vpn connection to acess my home network from a remote location.
I did buy an old Dell Poweredge 1950 back in 2015 and left it at my highschool, it was used for display since it looked cool. I don’t remember the exact specs but it came with a pentium.