5 extra newbie self-hosting initiatives you possibly can run on any outdated PC
Many self-hosted providers require a robust CPU, plenty of storage, or a devoted GPU, however lots of my favourite apps do not. In truth, a lot of the providers I run every day would run acceptably on any PC made within the final 10 to fifteen years. If you need to attempt self-hosting however do not feel like spending a month’s lease on a brand new PC, get away your outdated laptop computer that has been gathering mud in your closet as a substitute—it will do exactly fantastic.
Here are 5 nice self-hosted apps that may run on practically something.
Navidrome
A music server that may run on practically something
Navidrome is a self-hosted music server that’s famously light-weight.
It comes with its personal net participant, however the true energy is the Subsonic API compatibility, which suggests you need to use dozens of third-party shoppers (like Symfonium) to play again music from the server in your cellphone, PC, or TV.
Navidrome can deal with FLACs, MP3s, and most different music information on one thing as low-power as a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. There are nonetheless Navidrome builds that concentrate on 32-bit architectures too, which suggests you may conceivably run it on a very outdated PC.
Of course, Navidrome would not rip CDs or edit tags for you—you may must create your library manually and use MusicBrainz Picard to deal with the metadata.
Audiobookshelf
An Audible alternative in a tiny container
Audiobookshelf is to audiobooks and podcasts what Plex is to TV reveals and films. It shops your assortment of audiobooks, tracks your listening progress, retrieves metadata, and routinely downloads podcast episodes.
If you could have a library of DRM-free audiobooks or simply need to create a everlasting archive of your favourite podcasts, it’s a nice program to attempt.
It may even deal with most e-book codecs, together with EPUB and PDF, although the reader is pretty naked bones. If your major use case is an e-book supervisor, I’d counsel Calibre-Web as a substitute; it has extra reading-focused options you may use.
Audiobookshelf consumes just a few hundred megabytes of RAM at most, and since it’s simply streaming a file to a shopper, most CPUs can deal with it with out breaking a sweat.
Paperless-ngx
A self-hosted doc archive
Paperless-ngx is designed to make managing your paper paperwork simpler.
It makes use of optical character recognition (OCR) on the pictures or PDFs you feed it and builds a searchable archive of your paper paperwork. Each doc might be tagged based mostly on particular key phrases. If you need, you possibly can even allow an LLM classifier (locally, via Ollama) that may use AI to kind your paperwork for you.
Paperless-ngx will run on most older desktops, but it surely is not precisely light-weight. My Paperless-ngx server makes use of round 900MB of RAM whereas idle, and the OCR will use as a lot CPU energy as you are keen to throw at it. On an outdated CPU, OCR is prone to be pretty gradual.
Actual Budget
A private budgeting app that retains your financial institution historical past personal
Actual Budget is designed to be a self-hosted, open-source various to apps like You Need a Budget (YNAB) or the now-defunct Mint. It makes use of the same kind of envelope system as YNAB, the place every greenback is allotted to a selected “envelope” to account for it in your price range.
The server is extraordinarily light-weight since its solely actual job is to retailer a grasp copy of the information and synchronize it between your shoppers.
The primary hurdle is definitely getting knowledge out of your monetary establishment. You’ll want to make use of third-party bridges like SimpleFIN (a subscription service) or import CSV files manually. I want to keep away from exposing my banking knowledge to third-party providers, so I’ve been utilizing CSVs.
If you need to skip the server, you possibly can simply use the app in your PC.
WireGuard
Connect to your private home community from anyplace
If you need to hook up with units on your private home community, WireGuard is without doubt one of the best and most secure methods to do it.
WireGuard lets you hook up with a VPN server and securely tunnel your site visitors by means of it, in order that every part you do seems to originate from the VPN server.
WireGuard is utilized by many standard industrial VPN providers immediately, however on this case, the VPN server is a WireGuard server operating on your private home community slightly than a third-party server overseas. In impact, you possibly can tunnel from anyplace within the globe to your private home community with out worrying about exposing your community or your knowledge.
WireGuard is small (solely about 4,000 strains of code) and would not eat many assets, so the server will run on nearly something.
Keep it primary
If you have by no means self-hosted something earlier than, I’d advocate beginning with Navidrome first.
I’d additionally advocate in opposition to exposing any of those providers on to the web. You could also be tempted to configure Navidrome in order that it may be accessed from anyplace, however that opens one other assault avenue.
Instead, you need to use one thing like WireGuard or Tailscale to hook up with your private home community from the skin first; from there, you possibly can safely hook up with any of your providers such as you usually would with out opening a ton of additional ports or messing with a reverse proxy.
