I have an old ThinkPad-ish laptop gathering dust and a Raspberry Pi 4 on the wishlist for small self-hosting projects. Hot take: the old laptop might actually be the smarter, cheaper choice for a year or two. Is that insane, and what are the real tradeoffs I should be planning for?

My setup constraints: apartment, limited noise tolerance, dynamic ISP IP, budget under $100 for upgrades, want to run a few containers (Nextcloud, a tiny media server, home automation MQTT, maybe a reverse proxy). Practical points I care about: uptime, power draw, drive reliability, backups, security, and being able to recover if the thing dies.

Concrete checklist I would follow if I used the laptop:

  • Hardware: swap in an SSD if it has an HDD, 8+ GB RAM if you can, disable/replace a swollen battery, and dust out the fans. Old CPUs are fine for low-load containers. Expect 15-30W idle vs ~3-7W for a Pi.
  • OS: Debian/Ubuntu server, or Proxmox if you want VMs, or just plain Docker/docker-compose. Use a minimal install and disable desktop stuff.
  • Networking: give it a DHCP reservation or static on the router, set up a reverse proxy (nginx or Caddy) and TLS via Let’s Encrypt, consider Cloudflare or dynamic DNS if no static IP.
  • Backups: local backups with borg or restic to an external drive plus an encrypted remote backup (cheap VPS or offsite storage). Snapshot your important containers and DBs daily.
  • Power and reliability: use a cheap UPS if you care about graceful shutdowns - laptops have batteries but they fail; a UPS also protects the SSD. Monitor SMART for drive wear.
  • Security: SSH with keys only, fail2ban or sshguard, keep automatic security updates enabled for the kernel and critical packages, and run containers as non-root where possible.
  • Troubleshooting: check dmesg/syslog for thermal throttling, use htop/iostat to find bottlenecks, run smartctl to check drives, and use journalctl for service logs.

When to pick a Pi instead: if you absolutely need <10W power draw, want smaller form factor, or need a quiet 24/7 device with modern low-power silicon and easy HAT support. When to pick the laptop: when you want more CPU/RAM, built-in AC power handling, and easier local upgrades for cheap.

So: am I missing anything obvious that would make the laptop a stupid choice here? Or any gotchas from people who actually ran servers off old laptops long term?

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    6·
    8 hours ago

    Overall, it looks like you’re done your homework, covering the major concerns. What I would add is that keeping an RPi cool is a consideration, since without even a tiny heatsink, the main chip gets awfully hot. Active cooling with a fan should be considered to prevent thermal throttling.

    The same can apply to a laptop, since the intended use-case is with the monitor open and with the machine perched upon a flat and level surface. But they already have automatic thermal control, so the need for supplemental cooling is not very big.

    Also, it looks like you’ve already considered an OS. But for other people’s reference, an old x86 laptop (hopefully newer than i686) has a huge realm of potential OS’s, including all the major *BSD distros. Whereas I think only Ubuntu, Debian, and Raspbian are the major OS’s targeting the RPi.

    One last thing in favor of choosing laptop: using what you have on hand is good economics and reduces premature ewaste, as well as formenting the can-do attitude that’s common to self hosting (see: [email protected]).

    TL;DR: not insane. Don’t forget IPv6 support.