I’m wanting to run my own SimpleX chat server and set up a Monero node as well.
Can this be done on the same machine? I was considering getting a mini PC to do this so it wouldn’t be too much of an issue with it being always on.
Or should I take a different approach and set up both separately on two different machines like a raspberry pi or something?
As I’m sure you can tell I don’t have a lot of experience with self hosting anything but want to get into it to help strengthen the networks of these communities I care about.
Yes. You can run them both on the same machine and it would probably be cheaper that way.
To minimize costs, besides looking at the cost of hardware, you’ll also want to consider the amount of electricity that the server uses with the memory and hard drives you have installed.
The Monero docs say it uses 100 GB or more bandwidth a month. You may want to look at the quality of service settings on your router to make sure that it’s not interfering with other uses of your network.
With the Monero node, keep in mind hard drive space. If you want the full block chain, it’s a bit over 200GB. But if you want the pruned chain, it’s like 70GB.
Cheapest? Use someone else’s hrdware (or “borrow” it) and set it up at work/school/friend’s house/cafe. Free hardware, free connectivity, free electricity.
More seriously, set everithing up on whatever spare old computer you have at hand (or use a vm running on you pc). You should not start with buying hardware.
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It’s possible to run multiple services on the same machine, and actually it’s most often done that way, yes. To keep it all more portable and maintainable, people often use containerization software (like docker with docker compose). It has lower overhead than running VMs.
If you start hosting multiple services that have a web interface, you will probably want to look into a reverse proxy software, which is basically a web server that handles TLS uniformly and sorts your HTTP services to subdomains. The Apache web server is agood example.
Prepare yourself to the need of editing text files and using the linux shell, often through SSH. Most often the text files will not need to change after having it set up properly. These text files and tge linux terminal are much more friendly in my opinion than the windows registry and the windows cmd terminal, so don’t let that discourage you.
^^^ agree 100%
Additionally, I would recommend not buying any hardware right now. Just experiment with containers, or even virtual machines. Once you get a feel for how you want the system to work. Then you can look to offloading it to some low power device. But I would put that a few months down the road.
For what it’s worth a lot of people have a NAS, and that NAS also can run containers or virtual machines. TrueNAS/Synology, etc.
