So I want to get my first home server. Mosly for some basic applications (gitlab, matrix,…).
I don’t know where to start looking. I want to keep things cheap, I have no problem buying used. What are some good places to shop for used hardware? Preferentially in cases since I can’t really put a rack in my small apartment.
ebay, theres lots of used stuff on there for decent prices. Also dell has some of their lower end xeon stuff (equivalent to I5s) on sale all the time. The model is the t30, i seem them on sale for about 350 every couple weeks.
Well, for a homeserver you want something low power, so look at something like a celeron or pentium. You can also see if you can find a cheap Atom Motherboard (as far as I know all atoms are on BGA sockets, so soldered to the board).
You also might want to look into a board and CPU that supports ECC. It’s not as big a priority, but it’s a nice to have.
Is the server also acting as a fileserver or is it for application use only?
Mostly application. I stream music/video so I don’t need a file server, and I use an offsite service for backups. Mostly want to try my hand at virtualization with some applications and networking things like pfsense.
In that case you shouldn’t need anything extraordinarily strong, but should get a good amount of RAM since multiple VMs can eat on that quite fast.
As Hadesfriend said look on ebay, maybe used Dell machines would do even.
Well as you want cheap and non rack, take a look at used/refurb HP and Dell workstations. I’d suggest the Tower version not SFF so you can easily fit a few HDD/SSD in side. You wont have a raid controller to deal with, and you can use off the shelf SATA drives.
Used 4th Gen i5/i7 machines with 16/32GB ram (DDR3) can make a reasonable home server. I used an HP EliteDesk 800 G1 Tower for as an unraid server and hosted some VM’s on it myself. It was also reasonably quiet (power saving, fans slow/off when idle).