Help with a (reasonably cheap) build for the Louis Rossmann FUTO selfhosting setup

Clarence Boddicker · March 19

Budget (including currency): £450

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Louis Rossmann FUTO selfhosting guide

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): I have 2x 2TB M.2 SSD drives I was hoping to use as the main OS drives setup in RAID as per the guide (I know he said 2x 4TB but I'm not made of money). I also have an old HP Microserver on the network running OMV with 6TB of storage which I'm hoping I can map some drives to or do something funky to add extra storage into the mix.

Hi, I want to try and de-google myself a bit and setup something self hosted. I was thinking maybe trying to keep things reasonable small in form factor but realised that the high end Intel NUC that Louis uses is out of my price range. I was thinking I maybe Micro-ATX as a compromise on size and price? What do you fine people think?

OhYou_ · March 19

no idea what that even is, but it sounds like you need a server and will probably be running GNU/Linux on it, so £450 is a solid price for a basic build not factoring a windows license.
due to the low budget and importance of storage, you will likely have to go with an older platform, something like intel 13100 and a cheaper mobo that may not have enough m.2 for raid1.
May I suggest instead of being concerned with raid or dual NVME raid1, instead use one single larger sized nvme and employ a strong backup solution instead?
your use case simply doesnt justify the cost of raid. if your personal cloud goes down for a while due to a failed ssd, you can likely get by without it until you can fix it. The repair is just putting in a new ssd, and restoring a backup. there shouldn't be any data loss if backups are done right. Raid is only for redundancy to maintain uptime anyway.

Clarence Boddicker · March 19

Sorry wasn't sure if I should put links here but here's the guide so you know what I've been looking at https://wiki.futo.org/index.php/Introduction_to_a_Self_Managed_Life:_a_13_hour_%26_28_minute_presentation_by_FUTO_software#

your point about RAID makes sense and probably is something I should drop as part of the balancing cost vs utopian setup - thanks!

OhYou_ · March 19

tl;dr but that seems like a very long yet informative guide. I think with this you can copy paste sections into chatgpt to help explain issues too if you get stuck.
It looks like they are using the intel nuc as a router? if that is what you wish then building a whole pc for it is pointless, just get an office pc that at least has a half height pci-e slot and like intel 12th gen era or newer. slap in a suitable NIC and use that.

I'm not a big fan of self hosting such things. I have a $3 vps I rent thats hosted in Japan that does most of this for me instead. Sure it defeats some of the purpose, but it has significant advantages.