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?
In that case, I can recommend minicomputer's like HP EliteDesk G2 800 Mini. You can get them with a variety of intel CPUs, they can take up to 32GB RAM, they have slot for M.2 disks and a regular 2.5" SSD – and they hardly use any power when idle, between 5 to 10 watts, depending on the CPU and CPU governor settings. They are sold used for ~€50 and if you buy newer generations you'll get even more umpfh for a bit more cash.
In other words, very competetive with the Pi's, only more available, cheaper and about the same power consumption!
And look better.