Home Server Alternatives
A home server can cover several gaps left open by the typical networking gear that everybody has anyways. About three years ago I setup a RaspberryPi for that purpose to serve DNS with ad-blocking, OwnCloud, Wireguard VPN, MQTT, and more. Unfortunate InfluxDB did not run reliably on the RasPi, so I migrated it over to my build-server/NAS box, which requires the box to run 24/7 for the InfluxDB.
Recently I came across this article on STH that woke my interest in having something more adequate than a RasPi for all 24/7 core network services. There are many advantages of that box over a RasPi:
Browsing the forums of STH, I found a comment that the devices offered by Topton and other companies are in fact relabeled products from CWWK, and further remarks the service of CWWK were quite positive.
Then CWWK presented their updated version (V5) of this box, combined with an advertisement on the headline of the page "When you buy our products, you can immediately enjoy a 5% discount, free of freight and taxes!!!". OK, this price is pretty attractive, but what will it cost me in total? Is it just a teaser with some hidden costs? What would I pay in the end?
I was wondering if "free of freight and taxes" could refer to the German VAT, the Chinese VAT, the customs duty or whatever... Asking the online chat did not resolve my question. In the end, I gave it a try, because the price seemed quite attractive over alternatives, even including potential customs duties. When I received it, I found out that the price includes German VAT, customs duty, and freight! In fact the box was send from a German company, which had already done the customs and dealing with VAT.
So I payed 171 Euro for the barebone in total!!! (I.e. the box without memory and SSD, which I ordered separately)
The documentation is mostly in Chinese and quite limited, but that can be seen as a calculated trade-off at that costs. Apart from that, everything is included what you need. Even an adapter/cabel for a SATA disk.
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I ordered the box without RAM and SSDs, which you have to add to the price above. The nice point here, is that the box has 2 M.2 SSD ports and 2 S0-DIMM slots. So running a RAID-1 or a ZFS with mirroring is an option. Adding the SSDs and memory is easy.
My first boot quickly dropped into an EFI shell, because I had no boot media ready, but hitting enter after the beep will bring you into the BIOS. Installing Ubuntu (I used 22.04 LTS) is straight forward, and my box is now setup with a ZFS mirror and 2 Ethernet ports connected in bonded mode to the switch. I plan to connect another Ethernet port to a DMZ in a virtual box or so...
The box is running as advertised at about 10W, and transferring data over a single Ethernet port over a 1GB/s switch was saturating the link at over 100MB/s.
Right now it is hosting:
Of course this setup is more work, than buying a NAS box or similar of the shelve. Apart from being cheaper, it is also much more flexible. From a performance perspective this box beats any low-cost NAS and of course any kind of RasPi setup.
From my point of view, this is a great solution and good bang for the buck.