I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I’m only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I’m not sure of the best bang for my buck. I’d like good, long-term performance, but I don’t really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I’m thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?
As the computer nerd in my friends/family circle, Im constantly being gifted old PCs from people. Some I keep and repurpose into servers/other things and others I just recycle for them. I also am an avid PC gamer so when my rig gets retired I usually upgrade the other servers internals from parts I had left over. Don’t know if something else is viable for you to keep costs down, even if you can get the PC without a HDD but everything else.