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?
Hardware requirements really depend on what you want to do with the server. I have a few raspberry pi, an old PC, and at least one or two old laptops to host things on. But really, I use the old PC the most. It pulls more power than a raspberry pi, but I’ve found it to be much more reliable and stable.
Drop some additional hard drives if you need a media server. More memory & CPU if you are doing things like manipulating images or transcoding video. I run a webserver and host various subdomains for things I don’t want to pay to host. Plus working samples of my portfolio projects. I keep my actual portfolio on cloudflare, but link out to these work samples.
I also host some other apps that are just for my home network. Everything works great on a 10 year old PC sitting in a network closet. You are very likely not in need of professional server hardware.