Self-hosting had always sounded appealing; the idea of running my own services and keeping control of my data was music to my ears. Despite running a Home Assistant server for several years, however, I'd never gotten beyond that point until I bought a relatively cheap mini PC.
Why self-hosting never stuck before
The hardware was always holding me back
Adam Davidson/How-To Geek
For a long time, I ran Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. The low-power single-board computer was ideal for running my modest smart home, but it didn't leave any headroom for anything else.
I did try self-hosting some services on other computers. I tried setting up a Plex server running on my aging iMac, but it was so old that it wouldn't support hardware transcoding . Having to do without hardware transcoding led to constant buffering, which meant that I ended up giving up on the idea.
The problem wasn't that the idea of self-hosting was bad. I just didn't have the hardware to run it on. The appeal of self-hosting wasn't so strong that I felt it was worth spending significant amounts of money on a new computer or dedicated machine.
Why the Beelink Mini S12 Pro made the difference
The specs that matter
Rich Hein/How-To Geek
All of that changed when I bought a mini PC. I'd been wanting to upgrade my Home Assistant server for some time, and it seemed like a good opportunity to buy a device that could run Home Assistant and handle some other self-hosted services, too. A mini PC seemed like an affordable option.
If you're reading this now, thinking that you might do the same, I do feel a little guilty. I bought my mini PC in 2024, and back then, you could get some real bargains. I bought a Beelink Mini S12 Pro with an Intel N100 processor that can boost up to 3.4 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB SSD, and it cost me just over $200.
Right now on Amazon, that same model with that same spec is selling for $429, double what I paid. Comparatively speaking, it's still a decent value compared with many other PCs, but it's no longer the reasonably cheap option it used to be. There's a newer S13 model available with an N150 processor, which is currently selling for under $400 , or you can get one with less RAM and storage for under $300 .
The mini PC finally made it possible for me to run other services aside from Home Assistant. The 16 GB of RAM gives me enough room to run Proxmox Virtual Environment and have multiple self-hosted services running at once on the same machine. The iGPU features Intel Quick Sync Video , which can handle some 4K transcoding workloads without falling over. The small footprint and reasonably low power draw make it cheaper to run than a full-size desktop.
What I'm running on my mini PC
It's hard not to install all the things
The trouble with getting into self-hosting is that it's almost impossible to stop. You see a list of services that you could self-host, and you just want to start running them all. It's not realistic to run a huge number of services on my mini PC, so I had to restrain myself quite a bit.
A lot of the services on my mini PC are related to my smart home. Alongside Home Assistant, I run an MQTT server , the Node-RED flow-based automation software , the n8n automation software , and Uptime Kuma to alert me if my Home Assistant instance goes down. I also have a local text-to-speech (TTS) model running with a clone of my voice that can create spoken announcements on my smart speakers that sound like me, and a local LLM that can write the text for those announcements.
In addition to smart home services, I'm running a Jellyfin media server (which doesn't lock hardware transcoding behind a paid subscription, unlike Plex), Actual Budget budgeting software, and some services I set up to alert me about things I'm interested in, including a media tracker that tells me if there is new music or tours announced for my favorite artists, and another that alerts me when Switch and PS5 games I might like go on sale.
The final services that I'm running are a couple of MCP servers that I can use to allow Claude to talk to services such as n8n. All of these services are running on the same mini PC, and so far, I haven't had any issues.
My mini PC isn't perfect
Good luck running anything but small local LLMs
Corbin Davenport / How-To Geek / Ollama
That's not to say my mini PC is perfect. Without a dedicated GPU, it's not really suitable for running anything but smaller local LLMs. While I use it to generate text for announcements, the process is too slow to generate them on the fly; I have to generate my morning briefing at a set time each morning so that it's ready to play when we come down to the kitchen.
The mini PC also has other limitations. 16 GB of RAM is fine until you start stacking a few heavier services, at which point you'll wish you had more. The active cooling is fairly modest, so it can get hot; I've had mine overheat once when the vents were partially blocked. It's never going to be what you need to build the ultimate home lab, but it can run multiple useful services and handle them well.
A mini PC is a great self-hosting starter machine
If you want to get into self-hosting, a mini PC is a good starting point . You can do a lot with it without having to spend a small fortune. If you get the bug, you may soon have an urge to upgrade, but if you're happy running a reasonable set of services that aren't too heavy, it may be all you need.
