I’m considering setting up a home lab and truly self-hosting my own services. Unfortunately, my budget is limited to around $100-$150. I’m wondering if the HP Elitedesk mini PC is suitable for this purpose. I’m particularly looking at the HP Elitedesk 800 G3 or G5 models. Unfortunately, finding these devices in Dhaka has been challenging. So far, I’ve found a G3 on bikroy.com, but it comes with a 6th gen i7 CPU.
I have a G3 and, this might be counter intuitive, but buy an older model that uses DDR3 ram, old ram like that is obsolete and no one wants it, but more ram is more important in self-hosting than fast ram. Of course that limits how much you can do at once, but if you only have 8gb of ram instead of 32 or 64, the lack of ram is going to be very limiting in the sense that you’ll have to run very few things at one time and that becomes cumbersome to manage services “on demand”, starting them and shutting them down to save on ram, instead of letting them all be ready and idle.