Self-Hosting Websites at Home with an Old Mini-PC

If you want to host your (static) website at home, using—for example—an old PC as your home server, you can follow these steps. At Well Gedacht Publishing HQ, 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, which is more specific to self-hosting a static website, and make a single guide out of several available.

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