Self-hosting a server, what's the best CPU?
I don't have that much of a budget, but I was looking forward to start a self hosted minecraft modded server for me and my friends, and I've been looking forward to buy one of these two MinisForum Mini PCs to use as a server:
- Minisforum X300 -> AMD Ryzen™ 5 PRO 3400GE 16GB RAM/512GB SSD
- Minisforum X400-4650G -> AMD Ryzen Pro 4650G 16GB RAM/512GB SSD
I've been looking through the benchmarks and stuff, but I have no idea if they're suitable to host a small modded server, like ATM10 8/10 people max playing.
The 2nd one seems to be the better one, and for a 30€ difference I don't know how much better it is, but i'd love some help here!
Thanks!
12 Replies
whats the budget?
If you are looking to self-host just for the short term there are a variety of hosting services that will likely be better for your needs. If you are serious about taking the server long term (12 months+), ready to deal with the security concerns when making it public (Anyone can join, no whitelist), or are looking to homelab, then self-hosting may be a decent but more expensive choice
One benefit of self-hosting is that everything belongs to you and your costs are mostly upfront, meaning that you put more care into maximising the server experience/usage efficiency and are more likely to be a good server owner in future
200€ ish, nothing much more than that
yeah, i know, I've been looking a lot to try to homelab it, mostly because we always end up renting a server every summer, and right now we've spent more than the 230€/8 people
so I'd like to know if it would be a viable solution
and I've been wanting to start doing it for a while, so I was wondering if it would be a good way to start out
both are aging APUs they'll do the job, I think the newest AMD ones are the AI Max series or some stupid ass name like that anyways
yeah yeah
i was just looking for a "entry level" type thing
that would meet my needs, but would not blow my budget up a lot
do have to consider power costs, isp costs, worse ping than what hosts can provide generally etc
I've done it once with an old pc, with a I5-4790 / 12GB RAM DDR3, and it worked fine, the ping was alright (we all live in the same country) and didn't have much problems with that
the only problem that I felt at the time was the hardware was holding the server back
i'd always recommend as new as you can afford
if you went idk ryzen 7 - 3000 mobiles vs ryzen 5 4th gen mobile that could be a different story
incremental generational jumps aren't normally huge but if you have no current starting point then yeah as new as you can afford
is there any machine that you'd recommend in a 200€ budget?
according to that "as new as you can afford" rule
I'd probably look to old corporate optiplex models, they sell them normally at heavily discounted prices - 3070 micros i think have 12th gen intel in them
they should be hitting the market around this time - the three/four year old mark
okok
i'll keep an eye out on stuff like that then
but the ones that I've described, would they be able to fit my needs right now? or you thin that like in a year or two they'd just end up struggling?
Maybe not a year but i'd say by 2028/29 that is when we plan to retire all of our 3000 series CPUs from our free tier because they'll have served their commercial lifespan