I use a headless Raspberry Pi 4 connected via USB to an external 2TB SSD and host

• Nextcloud
• Pihole w/Unbound
• Transmission
• Jellyfin
• Webmin
• Apache webserver with a personal static webpage
• Soon to host my own Lemmy instance

I’ve had mostly good luck with lower end NUCs. I say mostly because of 3, one died a hard and abrupt death after 2 years; but the other 2 have been fine going on 2 years now. The only problem with NUCs in general is they tend to be over priced. If you can find them on sale they are totally worth it. As others have pointed out, you should have a plan for more storage. Personally I’ve found a good usb hub and some external disks work great for what I do. As to why I like them: 1) form factor, low profile cube, 2) they happily run headless, 3) hardware seems to be of decent quality (ignoring my i3 box that never turned back on after a reboot), 4) most models have enough I/O to fit your needs.

I got myself a used/refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Tiny, which works pretty well. Put in more ram and bigger storage and it is pretty beefy now as well as silent.

A few years old prebuilt for the office can work well, I have an HP 290 and HP S01 that work great as servers.

You can also use hosts like linode with $100 credits to try out self hosting with no investment at all. If you need a coupon code, let me know.

I have a big enough house to be able to put this machine somewhere out of the way but there are plenty of cheap server gear on classifieds. I paid ish 300 euros for a 32 core machine with 40gb ram. I can host all the things without it even breaking a sweat.

Probably uses a lot more electricity, but I haven’t really noticed it on my power bill

I just built a Server using J5040 board. With 16gb ram (yes it works) a 500gb m.2 as system , 2x4tb ironwolf as ZFS mirror pool, 350 W power supply all in the node 304 fractal case for 550 euro.

Runs proxmox as hypervisor for VM or Container. As example LXC container for motioneye and syncthing

I bought a Morefine N100 recently, it’s a great device. Support 1 NVMe and 1 SSD 2.5, you can use both combined in RAID and even backup options in the cloud or on an external disk through the USB3.0 ports.

Quicksync for Plex/tdarr works great on the latest version of Debian Bookworm.

Another vote for Asrock Deskmini. I’ve had an A300 going for a while now. It started off just doing a few things on Docker, it’s now been repurposed as a Proxmox host. The nvme plus 2x 2.5” sata is very useful for storage options, and you can put some reasonable desktop CPUs in - subject to cooling, of which you can get a very low profile replacement if you need to. As there’s no video on the motherboard and no space to fit a PCIe (let alone the video card) you are restricted to CPUs with onboard video, which I think is more of a restraint for the AMD version than the intel, but even so there are enough options in the AMD lineup if you need firepower.

Originally I had planned to do what you’re doing and use a mini PC to upgrade from my pi4 eventually what I did was get a Mac Mini and keep the pi for pihole and dhcp.

Not saying you should get a Mac mini m2 but the power consumption was the main push for me to go down that route cause remember you’re running the thjng 24/7 for years and depending where you live electricity isn’t cheap. (I pay 32.5p per kWh)

Considering the cost the same as a decently mid range mini pc (i got mine for £500 new) it makes sense.

If you’re looking at a cheaper budget try finding something at least 8th gen intel and up for better power savings

sounds like you need newegg.com. I build a new PC every few years and they have most things you want. tom’s hardware usually has reviews and lists. couple sites I can’t remember help with parts compatibility. use the search https://www.newegg.com/

If you just want something small and fun to play with Linux and containers try looking for used Chromeboxes. Just bear in mind that going down the *arr app rabbit hole usually means building something with more storage.