I’ve never done any sort of home networking or self-hosting of any kind but thanks to Jellyfin and Mastodon I’ve become interested in the idea. As I understand it, physical servers (“bare metal” correct?) are PCs intended for data storing and hosting services instead of being used as a daily driver like my desktop. From my (admittedly) limited research, dedicated servers are a bit expensive. However, it seems that you can convert an old PC and even laptop into a server (examples here and here). But should I use that or are there dedicated servers at “affordable” price points. Since is this is first experience with self-hosting, which would be a better route to take?
Yes, a used PC can work great for a home server. Just don’t go too old or it will be power hungry. Obviously you will want one with an integrated GPU to save power too. If you want to run jellyfin, make sure it supports hardware video encoding, preferably AV1 or H.265.