What I actually run
A list of the hardware and services behind every guide on this site. If a tutorial says "tested on Debian 13", this is the machine it was tested on.
Hardware
| Part | What it is | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Host | Lenovo M720q Tiny — i5-8500T, 32 GB DDR4, 1 TB NVMe | Bought used. Runs Proxmox 8 with three VMs and never breaks 35 °C. |
| Storage | 2 × 4 TB WD Red in a USB 3.2 enclosure, ZFS mirror | USB is not ideal. It has survived 14 months of daily backups, which is the honest answer. |
| Offsite | Backblaze B2 bucket, restic, ~180 GB | About $1.10/month at current usage. Restore tested every quarter. |
| Network | MikroTik hEX + Tailscale on the host | No ports forwarded. Tailscale handles the three devices that need in. |
| Editor | Neovim, Ghostty, a lot of tmux | Not relevant to self-hosting, mentioned because people ask. |
Total spend is around $420, most of it the two disks. Nothing here was sent to me for review; if that ever changes, the post will say so in the first paragraph.
Services
- Vaultwarden — passwords, single user, backed up nightly
- Nextcloud — files and calendar, the one service that eats the most RAM
- Immich — photos, still evaluating whether it replaces the phone upload habit
- Uptime Kuma — watches the reverse proxy, not the containers
- Gitea — private repos, mirrors to GitHub nightly
- Miniflux — RSS, because I still read feeds
Six services is deliberate. Every additional container is another thing to patch, back up and remember. I remove one before adding one.
What I would change
The USB enclosure. It works, and ZFS has caught two checksum errors that a plain ext4 disk would have passed silently — but a proper SATA backplane is on the list for next year. If you are buying today, spend the extra on a case with real drive bays instead of copying this setup for the sake of it.
Questions about any of this? Email me. Written by Henry Xiang.