[nirav72]

Regarding the money aspects of the high cost of entry - you can source cheap hardware from secondary markets. I just helped a friend setup a cheap selfhosting/homelab for his home. He bought couple of HP EliteDesk 800 G4 minis for $99/each with i5-8500T CPUs. Each came with 16gb ram. Both units had NVMe drives. So we just had to add couple of 2.5 SSDs 2tb ($50/each) for media storage. Running Ubuntu server with CasaOS ontop with handful of containers for media consumption (e.g Jellyfin) on one unit. The i5-8500T is new enough and supports Intel quicksync. So no GPU needed for transcoding. The second unit is running cloudflare tunnel daemon for things like his MicroBin(like pastebin), Wireguard VPN and NextCloud for external access. He still has plenty of room to add more applications to both servers.

[candiddevmike]

Where'd you find those, ebay? That sounds like a great deal.

[nirav72]

Amazon Renewed. But Ebay has them as well. Often a bit cheaper on ebay. If you spend a bit more time searching.

[gottorf]

Not the GP, but eBay is great for off-lease or just plain old computer equipment.