I’ve used lots of different boards. The Radxa Rock 3c is cheap and has decent performance, but the official OS support is a bit old. The Libre Computer boards are also good and have Armbian support. Libre Computer is releasing a couple more this year too. BananaPi has good options that aren’t expensive, like the BananaPi M5. Friendly Elec has some boards like the NanoPi R2C and R5C that aren’t pricey and have Armbian support. Any one of these boards are fine for a small home lab. Just boot Armbian, install Docker, and add your containers.
I haven't actually tried it since I'm still a beginner in selfhosting, but I was planning to buy a dedicated hardware for my homeland and my main two choices were the new Raspberry Pi 5 or some mini-PC like the one in this video I don't know if it could be similar to what you are looking for...
I've recently been looking into ESP32 programming - they're microcontrollers with onboard Bluetooth and WiFi, that are smaller yet more powerful than Arduinos. Randomnerdtutorials gets recommended a lot elsewhere; I believe I saw one tutorial for running a web server on an ESP32.
If you need a full OS and/or more resources, I'm not sure raspberry pi can be beaten (at least, that's how the market was years ago when I was looking)
Running a webserver is not the same as hosting a service. For the software examples requested by OP, an ESP32 is useless
Ah must've skimmed over that part, my bad. The home automation part jumped out to me
It's Alright but for me microcontrollers like the one you told me are out of way since i need to run most and foremost docker for things like jellyfin /adgaurd home etc.
My current server runs on a fan less embedded Celeron board from ASRock, it runs really well... But since I've upgraded my desktop, I'm building a Ryzen server now
I know you want an upgrade over rPi but If you want a cheaper option, you can buy an android box and install linux on it. most of them have unlocked bootloaders. you can usually find a ready to use .iso on Armbian community forums by searching the SOC model there.
Personally I run a 5$ android box. it has a quad core cpu + 2GB of ram. I use it for hosting my music library on an external hdd and streaming 1080p video. I also set it as my vpn gateway. It's enough for my use case so I didn't upgrade it.
Rock 64 or zimaboard are some other alternatives. Iirc they're around the same price range though.
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