I have owned my Synology NAS and enjoyed self-hosting with it for about 2 years now. I never self-hosted before owning it, so this is all I know. The only reason I purchased one in the first place was because of my discovery of Plex media server. Plex was great on PC for the first little bit until I realized I was outgrowing my ability to reliably host it for myself and family to enjoy and that’s what forced me to find a dedicated solution, which led me to the Synology NAS.
I wonder to myself sometimes if I would be better off building my own system with my own parts. What has stopped me I think mostly is sacrificing the Synology DSM OS, which I really do like and find good value in. I know there are Linux distros for specific NAS needs, but I haven’t had any experience with them to know if it’s a good choice for self-hosting.
Is Synology NAS the way?
What do you have?
How do you like it?
Are you planning to change your setup?
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Honestly if it works for what you have and you like it? Keep it.
I think we often can browse Reddit, and hear things from friends and others who self host and what there setup is. There’s no “the best” setup. It’s just what’s “the best” for your needs?
I have a custom built server. I built it no different that how one might build a PC.
I have a: Ryzen 5700G 8C/16T 64GB gskill 3200 or 3600mhz Neo 2TB Samsung 980 On a ASrock mobo with 2.5GB Ethernet (my internet isn’t even gigabit) Inside a NZXT H1
What do I host?
Classic home utilities people list on this sub. Also other utilities for fun. Otherwise? Game servers. I bought a beefy rig for my MC servers with friends and ambitions of “public mc servers”. But I also host more than just MC servers. I got that CPU too cause it has integrated which I knew would help for jellyfin. I plan to when I go home some weekend (in college currently) to buy and install 1 or 2 20TB drives for “Linux isos” and my FLAC library that’s growing. Xo bandcamp also rip bandcamp.
I upgraded from an old Mac Mini 2012 that worked and would be better than what I have now for the basic stuff. Again though I have game servers but it doesn’t see much usage of those right now. But I can do more with my own server than the $25/ month rental for just MC with often less ram.
I recently just debated did I go wrong when I setup the new server with Ubuntu instead of Proxmox. Did I? No cause it works for what I need. I can do all I need and want, I don’t need VMs and if I really do I have Kasm.
I’ve never had a NAS though even though I use NextCloud on this device. I’ve yet to establish what and how I want to save backups though. Sure they save somewhere but I wanted to buy a 20TB just for them. Also I’ve never used RAID but I think you’ve got to have more money and persistent data movement to justify that. RAID’s just another way have managing data though and effectively maintains backups and harnessing mass storage.
Hopefully this helps! Happy Hosting!
DIY always better for an all around server which is a nas but also a application server.
I have an old i7-7700T with 32gb ram in a fractal node 304 case, running Ubuntu and 3x4tb drives in zfs raidz1. There’s little it can’t handle.
I’m a 20 year IT and DevOps guy, and I run Synology at home after years of old servers and whitebox home labs.
I use it because it Just Works, and when I’m at home I want to be working on my personal projects and relaxing, not learning or troubleshooting.
I have the full *arr suite, Plex and file services on my DS920+, and unless I’m transcoding several streams, the CPU barely gets warm.
I do plan on adding some edge devices on NUC, Mac Minis or Arduino, but they will run strictly as edge devices or specialty boxes like video conversion.
More devices means more complexity. The Synology is perfectly capable of running my house stuff for me, so I keep it simple.
I started with Syno, selfhosting more and more, then switched to containers. After that bought a dedicated mini PC for the more CPU intensive tasks and migrated the containers to it. The data resides on the Nas and the rest is on the mini server.