I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
My current home server that runs three dozen containers including Plex and Emby as well as two dozen other services and many terabytes of data is literally an old Lenovo desktop I got for free out of somebody’s garage 14 years ago. So yeah it’s sort of a perfectly fine place to start.