This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
oldskool, for something like this you can throw an old nuc on the network
multiple cores is the norm even on budget hardware so a surprising amount of cheap hardware is quite capable.
highly recommend looking into 1L systems. I moved in this direction after realizing i was headed down the same path as you.
Actually, these are mostly dual-socket boxes with lots of cores, ECC RAM and lots of 3.5", 2.5" spindles and SSDs, plus private storage networks, and such.
Instead of a NUC I run a 1U Supermicro 8-core Atom C2758 with 16 GB RAM and SSDs which is quite durable but will die eventually. With more modern hardware I meant something like that, only with onboard 10G and/or 50G (SFP+/SFP56) with more and better cores as well as onboard NVMe along with frontal SAS/SATA slots. And of course some larger SSDs to populate these.