Anyone else using Mac minis as VM hosts for self hosting? My Friendica server is a Linux VM on a Mac Mini in my living room. The VM is bound to a VLAN tagged network interface so it’s completely firewalled off from the rest of my network. Also got a second Linux VM on the same box for hosting local stuff on my main VLAN (HomeBridge/etc).
I feel like they’re really nice platforms for this, if not the cheapest. Cheaper than one might think though; I specced up an equivalent NUC and there wasn’t a lot of difference in price, and the M2 is really fast.
@BornDeranged Honestly, moving stuff to the cloud is trivial. Everything is in containers and I can just setup the nginx reverse proxy that’s also running on the VLAN to redirect to the cloud. Job done.
Sure. But if I hosted on an Apple Silicon, I would use native services where available. And Apple Silicon in the cloud is harder to find.
@BornDeranged I’m running everything in containers. Not got anything which cares which architecture the server is. Data is data.
Then why are you so hung up on running server processes on mac minis? That just seems like bad infrastructure design.
@aniki because it was the cheapest machine available for the performance I wanted in a useful form factor.
I think that’s highly wrong on both counts. And what are you going to do when your storage or memory breaks on a soldered motherboard? You just doubled your expenditure and you’ll only get back to where you were.
Don’t host on a Mac. Use the mac as a mac and get a NUC to run your VMs on with a Linux host. You can get a 12th gen Intel NUC for like a hundred bucks.
@aniki As I said, I did the comparisons fully expecting to get a NUC. The Mac was cheaper at the performance point.
As for US prices, not especially relevant to me. Import taxes are a thing.