I also have a Synology NAS and second this.

Yes, it’s super cool to selfhost a NAS yourself, but I really just want my storage to work and not need to be tinkered with at all. I’d be mauled by the missus if something was to happen to my AIO-server/NAS, so I’d rather split them.

Let a professional company deal with keeping your storage online at all times, and have fun with the “not so important” things like docker containers on your own server.
It costs a bit more, but it gives me peace of mind.

I second this.

Bought a $150 NGKTech from Aliexpress with 16 GB of RAM a couple of years ago, and it’s been such a beast with Proxmox.
Extremely low power consumption, no fan noise, barely any heat and chugs through Jellyfin transcoding, Minecraft/Valheim servers, HA OS and so many more small containers.
Just remember to set the C-state in BIOS and re-paste the CPU before you fire it up. The stock stuff is crap.

I was expecting to outgrow it quite quickly, but it just powers through it all.
I can’t see any reason to get anything more powerful at all.

Whatever you reason: let’s get you started!

Let me know if you’re taking me up on the offer or feel free to ask me directly if you’re more comfortable with that.

Happy New Year!

Agree with everybody else here: don’t pay anyone for this.
We’re all a bunch of people hating that everything costs so much, so we selfhost what we can.

Use us, learn from our mistakes, make your own and start over when you fuck up to badly. We’ve all done it and still do it.
We’ll hold your hand every time you come back and ask for help, as long as you’ve shown at least a tiny bit of effort on your end.

Depending on your timezone, I could hop in a quick Discord call and nudge you in the right direction if it gets you going. I have some experience with ADHD so I know from second hand experience how you feel.
My TZ is CET.

Best of luck anyways!

Nice!

We always get to mountain, then run out of steam before restarting a few months later.
Have fun!

I agree.

Separate NAS/storage from server for some redundancy, and flexibility. SMB or NFS for access to files.
It’s also nice paying a premium but letting someone else be responsible for keeping it running.

If you have a distaste for Synology after their recent antics, then go with someone else.

I’d say go with a 4-bay and put two disks in, then you have loads of room to expand in the future. This is mainly because of Jellyfin and how these libraries have a tendency to grow a lot with time.

You’re not wrong, but I think you might be leaving some future capabilities on the table, that’s it.
There is nothing wrong with running everything through Portainer at all. It’s how I started myself. The downside is that it’s limited if you ever wish to do e.g. HA OS or a sandboxed OS for testing/playing around. Automatic backups, re-sizing LXC’s or giving more memory is also easier to do with a GUI than in CLI. At least for me hehe.

That’s the great thing about self hosting though: if you’re happy with it, then it’s perfect!
Don’t change anything because someone tells you to if it works for you, friend!

Yeah it’s a bit of an unfair comparison that. Hypervisor VS conainer manager.
The reason you run Proxmox is to do «everything» in one place, including docker.

If all you host are containers, then I agree it’s overkill, but if you want VM’s and containers combined, maybe even in a cluster, then Proxmox is hard to beat.

I host LXC’s with Portainer inside Proxmox, as I find it easier to deal with and maintain. Then in a VM I run the full HomeAssistant OS instead of the Docker image.

Unless you don’t need it at all, I’d recommend you give it another try. It’s a very flexible system that «does it all» once you get going.

Agree, the old ones are not good.
I just swapped the 4k one with the TV Streamer and been very happy.
4k high bitrate files play easily.

Your server of course matters, so make sure it’s up to the task.

It was actually a good choice, as the 4k one doesn’t support AV1 for some weird reason.
Mine died and I replaced it with the TV Streamer and been very happy with it.

Yeah it’s Google and the HW is barely better, but the codec support and upgraded remote are awesome.
Plays anything I throw at it with ease.
I host on a N100 and it is really good with transcoding files for older devices.

Yeah I can’t argue with that, it’s more that I have no financial gain in this setup, so every redundancy set up costs me directly. At some point I have to say that it’s good enough.

It’s always a trade-off I guess, with cost being the deciding factor.
If I ever build a new house, I’m having a proper rack with room for a redundant server for sure!

Like others have said, I also prefer having a backup and getting new HW when shit hits the fan.
You can build a warm-standby solution, but that road is both costly and more labor intensive.

The family can survive for a few hours while I run out to get a new drive or NUC to fix stuff.
If you’re lucky, it happens right after dinner so you can skip clean-up too!

I have three servers running these days.
One is a NAS that hosts the .arr suite and my torrent client. This is just to keep the media management in one place.
A N100 NUC that runs a lot of stuff in Proxmox, like Jellyfin, Heimdal, HomeAssistant, PiHole, Tailscale. I hope to add Caddy to this in the future, but I’ve never played with a reverse proxy before so I’m a tiny bit scared hehe.
Lastly is a inudstrial PC I got from work that hosts game servers. Right now it’s down as we haven’t had time to game, but usually it’s either a Minecraft server or Valheim.

For backup I have one copy on the NAS and I upload the most critical data to a cloud service I trust and pay for. This is now Proton.
My dream is finding a tech friend with his/her own NAS so we can set up a encrypted partition on each others NASes for automatic backup. I give you 1 TB, you give me 1 TB, life’s good!

As with most things: it depends…

If you’re in a country where ISP’s freely give out user info, I’d say you should have a VPN.
If you’re on a private tracker, you might not need it, but you never know if the people hunting pirates managed to get in there too.
I don’t use one as our ISP’s mostly throw those letters in the trash and I’m in a private tracker, but your mileage may vary.

To get started, you only need a server (like Jellyfin or Plex) and a torrent client. Then you can automate it with the .arr stack, such as Radarr and Sonarr, race others with autodl-issri/Autobrr, share your media with friends and family with open ports (not recommended) or Tailscale/Netbird…
It gets as advanced as you yourself want it to be.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions, not just about piracy but how to set things up in general.
Good luck, and remember to have fun while doing it. If you don’t, you won’t bother keeping it updated and working in the future.

Webrips. That’s how we get movies and shows today without waiting for physical media being released

Ooooo I’ve been pushing this waiting for a final release. Seems I no longer have an excuse not to update.

Really well done by the devs. Looking forward to testing it!

Edit: just did the upgrade in my LXC. It literally took three minutes on a N100 NUC and worked instantly. Just had to clear the cache on a few of the phone apps and log back in.
The server looks a lot better, so kudos again to the devs!

Yupp, pops up randomly after downloading (probably a schedule but I don’t know when it runs). If I need it straight away, a manual scan takes 15 seconds.

I usually notice something new has dropped when it pops up in “Recently added” and never check qBit or the .arr’s.

NFS share from NAS and Jellyfin on separate Proxmox server.

Are you streaming to a Chromecast, by any chance? Or a older Galaxy device?
The 4k Chromecast with Google TV does not support AV1, but the 1080p version does. Jellyfin tried Direct Playing AV1 files, which obviously went poorly.

I run the same CPU in my NUC as you do, and all data is on a NAS shared with NFS. It’s been absolutely bulletproof for about a year, so I’m confident you should be able to make this work.

Any other containers running at the same time?
No cooling issues?

Just asking because mine dropped massively in temp when repasted.

Yeah my CCwGTV is what died, so I ended up with their streamer. Hopefully locking sideloading is not something that will happen yet, but they are fighting hard to control how we use the internet these days.

Give me a AppleTV with sideloading and I’d pick it up in a heartbeat. It just works so well.

You could buy a small NUC and format to Linux, but you’d be stuck with either a keyboard or some small keyboard-like remote in the living room.

Let’s hope for better offerings in the future!

Honestly, if YT didn’t up their prices for Premium over and over I would have gone with Apple TV in a heartbeat.

Right now it’s a bloody principle to not pay for that shit, but I live with tiny tiny humans who use it a lot more than myself.

I ended up with the streamer, but not entierly happily. If Valve or Nvidia drops something proper, it will be sold fast.

Thanks for your input!