A cheap homelab that just works

You don’t need a rack to run a few services. A modern mini-PC with a fanless or near-fanless design, 32 GB of RAM, and a single NVMe drive handles more workloads than most people will ever throw at it.

The shortlist

• Mini PC (any recent N100/N150 or Ryzen U-series box): silent, sips power, ~10 W idle.
• One NVMe drive instead of a RAID array you don’t need. Backups matter more than redundancy.
• USB UPS so the box shuts down cleanly instead of corrupting its filesystem.

The actual setup

# keep it boring: debian + podman, services as quadlets
podman run -d --name=uptime \
  --restart=always \
  -p 3001:3001 \
  louislam/uptime-kuma:latest

The whole thing draws less than a lightbulb and never makes a sound. Resist the urge to buy a 2U server.