Hosting a Server at Home

I will now start a new series of posts on how I set up my server at home. It hosts several applications, is accessible from the web (but only via HTTPS), and solves some problems in a nice way for me.

First of all, I had to figure out, what hardware to use. If you already have a PC lying around, fine. If not, there are several options. My main requirements were that it shall run stable (and to a point perform well) and not use too much power.

I started off with a Raspberry Pi 3+, which I had already, but soon learned that it wouldn’t fulfill the first requirement. I think I burned three SD cards before giving up. There were most likely just too many read/write accesses.

I then did a little research and figured out that a mini PC would best fulfill my requirements. Now, there are lots of them out there and which one to choose mostly depends on what you want to do with it. I decided to go for the NiPoGi AK2 Plus. It was not too expensive and has enough power for what I need. I updated it by adding a second 512GB SSD, which I already owned.

Later I added an external USB HDD as a backup and storage drive for all the data. It is a 5TB USB-3.0 drive from Western Digital. After figuring out how to get the HDD to go to sleep when not actively used, I was very satisfied with this setup.

I usually run the PC headless but can connect it to the HDMI input of one of my monitors when needed. Most likely a TV would also work for these rare cases.

Now that the hardware was there, I could start setting it up. I’ll describe the setup in the sequence I would now consider best, but for sure I experimented a lot and it was not as straightforward when I installed things. 😀

Note:
This page contains affiliate links to Amazon. Feel free to order your hardware anywhere, but it would be nice of you to use these links so that I get a small reward for writing all this information up. 😉

     Ubuntu ►