This is part 1 of Homelab from Zero, a series you can follow along with from nothing. By the end of it you’ll have a small home server running real, useful services. Today’s job is simple: get a machine.

What a homelab actually needs

Less than you think. Your first server will run a handful of lightweight services, an ad blocker, a dashboard, some monitoring. None of that needs a gaming PC. What matters, roughly in order:

What	Why it matters	Aim for
RAM	More services = more RAM. The first thing you’ll run out of.	8 GB, 16 GB if cheap
Storage	The OS plus your apps’ data. SSD makes everything feel fast.	256 GB SSD
Power draw	This thing runs 24/7. Watts become money.	Under ~15 W idle
Noise	It’ll live in your house.	Fanless or quiet
CPU	Almost anything from the last decade is fine.	Don’t overthink it

Notice what’s not on the list: a fast GPU, lots of cores, anything new.

The three sensible options

A used mini-PC (my pick). Office machines like a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, HP EliteDesk Mini, or Dell OptiPlex Micro flood the used market when companies refresh their fleets. ~$100–150 gets you something quiet, low-power, and far more capable than a new device at the same price. This is the default answer for a reason.

A Raspberry Pi. Tiny, silent, sips power. It can absolutely run your first few services, and if you already own one, start there. But a Pi with a case, power supply, and SSD costs about the same as a used mini-PC that’s several times faster, so I wouldn’t buy one specifically for this.

That old desktop in your closet. Costs nothing, works today. The catch is power: an old tower can idle at 50–100 W, which adds up on the electric bill. Fine to start with. Just know the mini-PC pays for itself within a year or two of saved electricity.

What I’d avoid (for now)

• Old enterprise servers. Cheap on eBay, sound like jet engines, heat the room. Cool later, miserable first.
• Building a NAS first. Storage is its own project. Start with one small box; add storage when you know what you need.
• Buying for the future. You don’t yet know what your lab will become. Spend little, learn, upgrade with intent.

The one-line decision

Have a spare machine? Use it. Otherwise buy a used 8 GB mini-PC for about $120 and stop researching.

Seriously, the research rabbit hole is where most homelabs die before they exist. Any of these boxes will run everything in this series.

What you have now

A machine (or an order confirmation). That’s the whole prerequisite for this series. In part 2 we put Linux on it, plug it into your network, and control it from your couch over SSH, the moment it stops being a computer and starts being a server.

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