Mini-PC Home Server Guide

If you want to have a home server, where you can host services and websites, using—for example—an old mini PC, you can follow these steps. At Well Gedacht Publishing, we use an old HP Prodesk 400 G3 Mini we bought off Kleinanzeigen for around 40 bucks (€). These types of mini PCs are relatively easy to find for cheap use online because they were used widely by companies that bought them in large quantities. After their corporate owners renew them, most of these old but perfectly capable PCs end up on websites like eBay. The main advantage of these mini PCs that were meant for enterprise use is that they consume low energy when idle. We installed Proxmox on it and then used a Debian Linux virtual machine to run Docker.

We compiled this guide using a bunch of different guides found online, which we linked in this article. There are many well-put-together guides on self-hosting, Docker, Nginx Proxy Manager, etc. Still, the majority of them focus on making your self-hosted services accessible online, for example, making a Jellyfin or a Guacamole server remotely accessible online. Since we used different how-to guides to accomplish what we wanted, we decided to document our process, and make a single guide out of several available.

Figure 1: The internals of the HP Prodesk 400 G3 Mini. This one is equipped with an i3-7100T 3,4Ghz CPU, 8GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32GB), and 256GB NVMe storage. Those are fairly capable specs for what we want to achieve here.

First of all, this is a list of what we currently self-host on this HP Mini-PC:

Figure 2: The PC in question.