Hey everyone 😊

I’m selfhosting for several years now, and the services I run grew over time.

I currently run:

Synology DS920+: Jellyfin, Immich, Gitea, StirlingPDF, MariaDB

Raspberry Pi 4: a small website, Pi-hole+unbound (with custom DNS), Vaultwarden, Beszel, UptimeKuma (Instance 1), searxng, NUT UPS server, HomeAssistant

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W: motionEye (only occasionally when I’m away)

Main vps: my main website + file sharing web app + database, Jitsi Meet, ntfy, n8n + ollama, mealie

a second vps only for mailcow

a third vps only for headscale

a synology at a family members house acts as offsite backup destination and also runs a second instance of Uptime Kuma.

As you can see, with Vaultwarden, the Raspi 4 runs quite an important service for me, and also with pihole+unbound where I also add my own internal DNS stuff, its quite a central piece to my home lab. But with the latest addition of HomeAssistant, I became very worried that the SD card might fail at some point and also that the performace is not enough for 24/7 use and also future services I might add.

Also, you might have noticed that with n8n and mealie, that I installed them at my main vps for some reason... they are only accessible through my VPN, not publically... but everything else on the VPS is for public use. Only the webhook endpoints for n8n are accessible from the internet, because they have to.

And as the main NAS mostly is used for file storage (project archives, backups, media) and running Jellyfin and Immich, the additional services there don’t really match the purpose as well...

My plan is to get a mini pc that should act as a central home server.

It should run the pihole-unbound container (because I’ve read that this combination doesn’t run great on an openwrt router? Otherwise I would move it there)

Then a first VM for all the stuff that should be able to get accessed publically and that will get proxied though my VPS... currently planned is just n8n+ollama (it doesnt have to perform well, just a few simple prompts). acutally, I first thought of moving everything from the VPS to this VM and downgrade the VPS to a proxy-only vps, but I’m worried that loading times will increase for my website (it is a really complex php web app including nextcloud-like file sharing) and performance wll drop for jitsi meet... and it also makes sense that ntfy is in the cloud, as the backup uptimekuma will also need to send notifications to me when my home has no internet anymore... but maybe I can move the website to local if the performance drops aren’t that huge... it would be nice to store the file-sharing data locally instead of on a server in the cloud.

The second VM (or docker lxc container only?) then will become my private docker host for internal services: Vaultwarden, searxng, UptimeKuma, Beszel, mealie (moved from VPS), Gitea (moved from NAS), StirlingPDF (moved from NAS), MariaDB Database (moved from NAS)...

The third VM will be my HomeAssistant vm

And I’m planning of maybe adding a fourth VM that acts as a small web server LAMPP stack... either for testing my main web app locally and/or for hosting the small website that previously was hosted on the pi4 as well... but this could also be done in the docker vm I guess...

The NUT Tools UPS server (that monitors my UPS via USB cable and tells the other devices to shut down on power outage) then would be moved to my OpenWrt router, if thats possible.... I think that would make more sense...

So, my questions to you guys now are:

a) Does my plan make sense? I would sleep better especially if Vaultwarden would be on a server that runs NOT on an SD card that could fail every moment.

b) What mini-pc can you recommend for this? I had eyes on either:

• Lenovo ThinkCentre M910q Intel i5 6500t 4-Thread 3.1 GHz with 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD

• AWOW AK10 Pro Mini PC Intel N100 (up to 3.4GHz), 16GB RAM 512GB SSD

What do you guys think?