What laptop computers should I look for if I wanna use YunoHost to host Lemmy without much difficulty? I’m only bringing less than $200 with me, maybe $160-$180.
Hetzner has VPSs and YunoHost as an option. You could do that for Uber $10/month. But, otherwise, anything used with an SSD. You’ll need ddns with port forwarding and likely a reverse proxy as well.
I’m ignorant in this topic, but wouldn’t it be better to find some private server provider? This could last you like 4 years with some low-end gear.
Thanks!!
I use an old Thinkpad that I got on eBay and upgraded the RAM for.
Does it need to be a laptop or could it be a refurbished Mini-Office PC like a Lenovo m710q? Because you could cut that price in half.
I just said laptop because we have no monitors or places to hook up a monitor and computer
No TVs either? Most laptops and desktops over the last 15+ years have either HDMI/VGA which are generally available on TVs made in the last 15+ years too.
Additionally, if you get Windows 10/11 Pro (can be gotten for free nowadays with some searching) or Linux, you can either SSH or RDP into those boxes so you’d only need the monitor/TV on first time setup. After that, you’d just have the box sitting in a corner and you’d remote into that from another device. I have a Windows 11 Pro and Raspberry Pi at my home that I remote into and they never get connected to a monitor or TV unless something really bad happened like the OS borked or something. I even use my iPhone to RDP/SSH, so you don’t even need a computer for remoting either. The options to SSH/RDP are even better if you’re on Android, in my opinion.
If you have a family TV in the living room, that may be the best place to put it, though you’ll ideally also want somewhere with access to an Ethernet cable than relying on WiFi for the best performance. But I say next to the living room TV because then you can easily hook it up to the TV if you need to and not have to power down and physically move it.
You can set up RDP on most Linux distros. There are a lot of guides online to help with that so you can get a full view of the computer as if you were seated in front of a monitor. Otherwise you can just rely on SSH and run your commands off there. I use RDP for my W11 server and SSH for my PiHole server. The Windows App on iPhone (and iPad) works well for me, plus using a keyboard and mouse if I feel I need it. And then I have an SSH app on my phone I can use to connect and send commands remotely.
If you are serving it to the public, a good VPS would be better.
Chances are that your internet is not as reliable as something like Hetzner’s.
At that price point, something used and not particularly recent. Even an old laptop will be good performance-wise, but not necessarily storage-wise.
However, buying a laptop to run at home might not be the most reliable or economical way to host Lemmy: you can rent a virtual server for not much, provided that you have access to a computer to remotely access the server with.
I have zero experience with YunoHost, so I don’t know how that may or may not limit the options. Probably the most common way is to use Lemmy-Ansible. It’s easy (well, relatively speaking) and is maintained by the actual lemmy devs themselves. Managed services (ones where you don’t have to deal with the server) should also exist for lemmy, but I’ve never used them.
