For small server, is it ok to go for consumer hardware?

[Lumikor]

my server right now serves as a media and web server, it runs pretty old hardware, but still able to stream my 1080p media. However, I want to replace it and I'm wondering if I should go for consumer products (I think 8th gen Celeron, perhaps even 9th gen if they'll come out soon) should be able to run media+web+email (yes, I also want to run a mail server) under CentOS and the old server will go to a remote location and serve as a backup server (after the QNAP fiasco, I really need one anyway) 

 

I want thinking of a Celeron + 16g of ram, but as I've never built a server before, perhaps going for low end xeon will be better + using ECC ram? 

My web and mail shouldn't be too heavy, today the web server deal with perhaps 1000 requests a day, so let's say about one request per minute. and I don't use mail that much, perhaps one mail a day (I have other accounts) 

 

I don't want to get cheap out on the server, but I don't want it to be a complete overkill. 

Any tips? 

[manikyath]

i'm technically using an acer TC-603 as a home server. i've since swapped out most of the hardware, but that wasnt because the old hardware was unable to keep up.

 

that said, if it's something publicly accessible.. put that stuff in a datacenter.

[xriqn]

If it's just for you personally, sure. If you check out my sig, I have a PC called The Oldie, I use that as a part time headless linux server for various purposes (ftp, plex, minecraft, etc). Its current specs are the updated ones, though I do still have all the original specs' parts too.

[Guest]

It's completely fine to run consumer hardware for a server, a xeon is complete overkill.

I run 2 game servers with 100+ people on 2 ryzen 1600 systems.

[jj9987]

It's fine for home/small business use, if you do not need really long lifetime and/or high uptime guarantees.

I had a server, consisted of i5-4460 with 16 GB of RAM and bunch of hard drives. Only upgraded to Xeon because I was lacking performance.

[Salacious B Crum]

As stated yes consumer grade hardware is more than adequate for your use case my specs are from a retired prebuilt i7 6700 and it has been flawless I am running unRAID as the OS so you would need to see if that is the right fit but I'm quite happy with my current setup in the signature below

[alex75871]

If you don't need the reliability of server-grade hardware designed for 24/7 operation then sure why not

[aezakmi]

yeah why not

 

my server was running with a celeron but I found some old server parts and now it runs on that, it's still a toaster though