I went through a similar thought process. Like you, I found that the Pi needs additional peripherals to be useful and that really pushes up total cost. I also ruled out cloud providers because I...
I went through a similar thought process. Like you, I found that the Pi needs additional peripherals to be useful and that really pushes up total cost. I also ruled out cloud providers because I wanted to own my hardware and not deal with all the strings attached to cloud "free" tiers and instance configs.
For me, I knew my needs would grow from web hosting to media serving and personal backup, and was looking to dip my toes into homelabbing, so I bought my own hardware and can share a starting point for that.
An off-lease machine (usually an optiplex, prodesk/elitedesk, or thinkcentre) is a prebuilt computer some office or school was throwing away, so it's 1. really freaking cheap and 2. practically plug-and-play. You basically need to worry about buying a boot disk and power cable. The sweet spot for me was:
7th gen intel or later (Kaby Lake was the first generation to include hardware decoding for HEVC 10-bit)
SFF form factor (has room for multiple SATA devices and m.2 slots)
HP Elitedesk 800 (has 2 3.5" disk slots where most SFF machines have only 1, and you can shove a 3rd in there if you're willing to give up the space above the PCI ports)
You can easily find a Kaby Lake SFF machine for $60-80 on eBay, or cheaper if you are ok with going older to Skylake or Haswell. USFF (mini/micro machines similar in size to the Pi) are usually around the same price. I don't know what's available on your local craigslist but the serviceability of these business-oriented models is way above that of consumer-grade hardware.
How much the initial cost of buying the hardware matters depends on how long you intend to use it. You also have to factor in the cost of operation (mainly electricity) for your hardware. I usually see idle power of 35W for my box, and that's with an i5-8500 and 3 SATA drives. That's about 305kWh yearly, which costs me about $40 or so. So if you spend $60 on the hardware and keep it for 2 years, you come out ahead of where you are right now and you have something you can easily expand later.
I went through a similar thought process. Like you, I found that the Pi needs additional peripherals to be useful and that really pushes up total cost. I also ruled out cloud providers because I wanted to own my hardware and not deal with all the strings attached to cloud "free" tiers and instance configs.
For me, I knew my needs would grow from web hosting to media serving and personal backup, and was looking to dip my toes into homelabbing, so I bought my own hardware and can share a starting point for that.
An off-lease machine (usually an optiplex, prodesk/elitedesk, or thinkcentre) is a prebuilt computer some office or school was throwing away, so it's 1. really freaking cheap and 2. practically plug-and-play. You basically need to worry about buying a boot disk and power cable. The sweet spot for me was:
You can easily find a Kaby Lake SFF machine for $60-80 on eBay, or cheaper if you are ok with going older to Skylake or Haswell. USFF (mini/micro machines similar in size to the Pi) are usually around the same price. I don't know what's available on your local craigslist but the serviceability of these business-oriented models is way above that of consumer-grade hardware.
How much the initial cost of buying the hardware matters depends on how long you intend to use it. You also have to factor in the cost of operation (mainly electricity) for your hardware. I usually see idle power of 35W for my box, and that's with an i5-8500 and 3 SATA drives. That's about 305kWh yearly, which costs me about $40 or so. So if you spend $60 on the hardware and keep it for 2 years, you come out ahead of where you are right now and you have something you can easily expand later.