litchralee

This looks amazing. That said, you may want to have a look at rules 7 and 8 for this community.

Contributors: Claude

Please kindly see Rule 8 of this community and its associated post.

In the space of mini PCs/NUCs, this does seem comparable. But bear in mind that the entire space of “home server” is a lot bigger than NUCs. After all, not everyone just wants to host an NVMe drive or two; they might want to fit some cheaper SATA SSDs or even spinning rust, as part of a cascade of stroage, with caching on SSDs and other nice things.

Likewise, the dual LAN ports with 802.3bz support is nice, but the reality is that most networks are only 1 Gbps with some devices supporting 2.5 Gbps. Quite frankly, for server use that actually needs one or both port’s bandwidth, the link would likely be better served with SFP+ slots, because of better compatibility with cheap enterprise switches available online, and because SFP+ transceivers run less hot than their twisted pair counterparts at 10 Gbps. Heck, you could even use a 40 Gbps QSFP+ NIC, which only requires a x8 or X4 PCIe slot (depending on PCIe generation of the NIC). On that note, a single PCIe slot is nice, but it does preclude the use of a double-wide GPU for transcoding use.

I would sum all this up as lacking expandability. Yes, it can be expanded somewhat. But for folks that want the capacity of an ATX-based build, this ain’t it. And for folks with abundant solar power, electricity consumption for older gen chips isn’t as much of a dealbreaker. It certainly checks off a lot of people’s boxes, yours included, but that doesn’t mean that people are “sleeping on” this, because at the end of the day, if it doesn’t serve their purposes, it’s not the right box for them. In terms of price, never underestimate the cost of $0.00 that is an old, unused laptop; they make remarkably decent servers for light loads.

Also, as of this writing, only the 32 GB RAM variant is available on the USA website.

Would cert-manager for Kubernetes be approximately what you’re looking for? In that particular case, it’s a service that runs in a K8s cluster, that can auto-request CSRs and send them to Lets Encrypt using one of the challenge types. It takes care of managing the returned certificates, such as renewing them before expiration and registering the private keys within the K8s key store.

I presume that you’re not already using K8s, so maybe that project will help you find the keywords to describe the sort of certificate manager that you want.

If you’re already using Debian on desktop, then Debian on a VPS makes sense from a maintenance perspective: you only have to track one set of security updates. When there’s suddenly a critical update for some vulnerability, you can update both at once because it’s the same upstream repos. Whereas with Ubuntu on your VPS, you’d have to be mindful to make sure to check back when the same vulnerability is patched there.

Do not underestimate the effort to upkeeping a server, and do try to unify your procedures so you’re spending less time doing the necessary things, and more time building up your self hosting stack.

I’ll offer a comparison not yet mentioned in the context of hosting software, but which should sound familiar in the social media context: moderation is hard at scale.

By every metric of scale, Codeberg is a competitor to the behemoth that is GitHub. And that means they have to contend with tough choices, such as who and what to host on their servers, no different than BlueSky, Facebook, and the individual instances of the Fediverse. And to be clear, Codeberg has always been limited to FOSS projects anyway, so nobody can genuinely argue that limits weren’t in the cards.

The distinction is that less alike Meta, and more alike with the Fediverse, Codeberg takes no hostages: people with obvious AI repos (or even marginal repos, given the possible ambiguity) are free to take their code and leave. Yes, they have to rebuild their CI pipelines, but that’s always required for any platform, including self hosting.

The fact is that Codeberg is a centralized entity that needs to (try to) make consistent policy. In this case, they have a concern about copyright and nothing anyone says can magically dematerialize that risk. If their new policy is not agreeable, then decentralized self hosting is probably the only way forward. But that was always an option with ForgeJo and federation.

And indeed, folks moving from GitHub or elsewhere are not exactly without fair warning that they might have to migrate again; we’ve not reached a utopia yet.