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?
These also have the advantage of being nice and quiet, which if you are going to have it in your house rather than a hot garage or whatever can be nice.
I bought a NAS, later realised that it supported Plex and Jellyfin but it was often too slow to do the transcoding. I still use it for storage but there were no real upgrade options. It was cheaper to get an old NUC, rather than replace the NAS with a high spec one to be able to run Jellyfin properly.