I’m new to this stuff so go easy on me.
So I want to get into selfhosting, and I’ve decided to get a Raspberry Pi 5. I plan to attach drives to it, from about 500GB-1TB. I’m on a budget, preferably under $100.
I want to host these things:
- A personal lemmy instance
- A samba server, to store files and backups
- A mail server
- A few other light docker containers
I was wondering whether I should get an SSD or an HDD for these. Lemmy would probably like an SSD because it uses Postgres, but an HDD would be better for storage since I get more GB per dollar.
What should I go with?
While I run my own Lemmy instance, I can say with 100% certainty - do not host a Lemmy instance on your own hardware.
It’s tempting, and I did, but don’t. The reason? CSAM. Your hosting stuff for other people, and if someone uploads something horrible to another instance, that is federated with you. That means now you are hosting that content.
The feds then have full rights to kick down your door and seize your hardware. On the cloud however, they’ll seize your VM , but your home stuff is okay.
Hosting Lemmy is great - but it’s something you really have to think about. Hosting your content is awesome, fun, and rewarding. I’ve learned hosting other people’s content is… Not as fun.
Didn’t the Lemmy teams sort of fix that CSAM thing ages ago?
I remember a wave of lockdowns and hush hush related to that, soon followed by an update to Pictrs with a bunch of new docker compose settings.
My server got pooched in the update and it took me almost a month to fix partly because I had little free time.
There were some automod things built by 3rd larties, and they help, but it’s still a worry. There’s also image proxying now, so at least I’m not directly hosting it, but I’m not 100% that the feds will see it that way immediately
friends dont let friends run mail servers. id recommend no on that one
Every time I think about hosting my own mail server, I think back to the many, many, many times I’ve had to troubleshoot corporate email systems over the years. From small ones that ran on duct tape and prayers to big ones that were robust, high dollar systems.
98% of the time, the reason the messages aren’t coming or going is something either really obscure or really stupid. Email itself isn’t that complicated and it’s a legacy communications medium at this point. But it’s had so much stuff piled on top of it for spam and fraud prevention, out of necessity, and that’s where the major headaches come from. Honestly, it’s one service that to me it’s worth paying someone else to deal with.
I’ve been running mailcow for almost 2 years with no issues. I’m not doing anything major with it, mainly using it to send myself alerts on the environment, but it does work for external purposes if I want it to as well. Updating is easy and seamless. I did get greylisted almost immediately though, so I use SMTP2Go and it works great as a free relay for the amount of mail I generate.
If you’re only looking for 1TB, go with an SSD. It’s about the same price. It’s only when you’re looking for >1TB that HDD starts to get substantially cheaper.
For any computer today, server or no, I’d probably default to SSD today unless I expected to be making use of a large store of files that I expected to access in serial, like a large movie collection or maybe a backup server that can play well with rotational drives.
The only thing there that looks like it could be doing that is the Samba server, depending upon what the remote clients are doing with it (could be a movie server).
In general, if you can fit your stuff on an SSD today, I’d get an SSD.
You also can also add a rotational drive down the line if you run low on space and need inexpensive space for something that you’re going to access in serial, and use both; just move the bulk stuff to the rotational drive then.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CSAM | Child Sexual Abuse Material |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
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