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?
While yes, there is a reason why I have retired the Dell server I had for a normal desktop PC. The server was so loud, I could hear it two stairs and two closed doors away.
I was able to quiet mine with a bash script until eventually a software update changed the fan control to keep it quiet for me.
Those Dell fans were never built to be quiet. And they are also not built to be replaced by any quiet fans.