Guide
Starting a Home Server
What it actually takes: my setup, the parts, and the prices.
People see my setup and ask what it takes to get started. Short answer: less than you'd think. You don't need a rack, a data center, or a networking degree. You need one small computer that stays on, and a willingness to tinker.
Here's the whole thing: what it costs, what runs on it, and where to start.
On prices: everything below is a rough 2026 ballpark. Hardware moves around a lot, so treat the numbers as "in this range" and click through for the real price of the day.
Why bother?
A home server is a little always-on computer in your house that runs the services you usually rent from someone else:
- Your own media library: your movies, shows, and music, on every screen in the house.
- Network-wide ad blocking: every device on your Wi-Fi, no extensions needed.
- Your own photo backup: off Google/Apple, on drives you own.
- Automation: turn a chore into a script, then a script into a service that just runs.
You buy the hardware once, the software is almost all free and open-source, and it sips electricity. After that it's yours.
The hardware
The brain: a mini PC (~$170)
The whole thing runs on a Beelink MINI S13, a mini PC the size of a paperback. Mine:
| CPU | Intel N150 (4 cores) |
| RAM | 16 GB (after an upgrade) |
| Storage | 500GB SSD |
| Power draw | ~6-10W (a lightbulb) |
| Price | $171 (what I paid) |
Why a mini PC instead of a Raspberry Pi or an old laptop: it's x86 (runs everything without ARM headaches), it's genuinely silent, it pulls almost no power, and it's cheap. This is the one part I'd tell anyone to start with.
You can stop here. A single mini PC with its own SSD will happily run ad-blocking, a media server, a dashboard, and a dozen other things. Everything below is "when you want more."
Storage: a NAS (optional, ~$420 + drives)
Once you're storing real media or backing up photos, you want dedicated storage with redundancy. I use a Synology DS425+, a 4-bay NAS ($416, diskless) with:
- 2× Seagate IronWolf 8 TB drives (~$150 each, $300 for the pair) in RAID 1. The two drives mirror each other, so if one dies, you lose nothing.
The mini PC does the thinking; the NAS does the storing. The mini PC mounts the NAS over the network and treats it like a big shared drive.
Starting out? Skip the NAS. Add it the day you outgrow the mini PC's SSD.
The optional fun stuff
- Raspberry Pi 4 on the living-room TV for retro gaming + game streaming.
- A Fire TV Stick 4K (~$25 on sale) for streaming games from a desktop PC.
Neither is required for a server. They're just where the tinkering leads.
What it costs
| Path | Parts | What it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Just get started | Mini PC + a USB stick | ~$180 |
| Media + backups | Mini PC ($171) + DS425+ ($416) + 2× 8 TB ($300) | ~$890 |
| Running cost | Electricity | ~$3-6 / month |
(Those middle numbers are what I actually paid. Add ~$100 for the RAM upgrade, cables, and a USB stick and my whole build came to about $1,000.)
Compare that last number to the streaming + cloud-storage subscriptions it replaces.
The software
Here's the part that surprises people: it's almost entirely free.
- Ubuntu Server, the operating system. No desktop, no bloat; you run it "headless" and control it from your laptop. Free. (Flash it to a USB stick with Balena Etcher, install, done.)
- Docker + Docker Compose. This is the magic. Every service runs in its own isolated "container." Adding a new app is a few lines of config, not an afternoon of dependency hell. Free.
- Tailscale, a dead-simple private network so you can reach your server (and everything on it) from anywhere, whether that's your phone on cellular or a laptop in a coffee shop, without opening a single port to the internet. Free for personal use, and the single biggest "how is this so easy" moment in the whole build.
That's the foundation: Ubuntu + Docker + Tailscale. Everything else is just containers you add on top.
What you can actually run
A curated "greatest hits", all free and open-source except Plex:
| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pi-hole | Network-wide ad + tracker blocking. Point your router at it once, every device benefits. |
| Jellyfin / Plex | Your own streaming service for movies, TV, and music. |
| Homepage | A clean dashboard with a tile for every service. Your server's front door. |
| Immich | Self-hosted Google Photos replacement. Auto-backup from your phone. |
| Uptime Kuma | Monitors everything and pings you if something goes down. |
| Watchtower | Auto-updates your containers so you don't have to babysit them. |
| n8n | Visual automation. Wire up "when X happens, do Y" workflows. |
For scale: mine runs ~40 containers now. But I started with about four, and so should you. The whole point is that you add one when you have a reason to, never before.
Where to start (the honest minimal path)
- Buy the mini PC (~$170) and an 8GB+ USB stick.
- Flash Ubuntu Server to the USB, install it, enable SSH.
- Reserve a static IP for it in your router (so it never moves).
- Install Docker, then Tailscale (so you can reach it from anywhere).
- Add one container. I'd do Pi-hole first; the ad-blocking is an instant, whole-house "oh, nice."
- Add Homepage so you have a dashboard, then whatever you actually want next.
That's a weekend. From there it grows one container at a time, and before long people are asking you what it takes.
Questions, or want the deeper how-to on any piece? Say hi.