Unless you specifically need ultra low power draw, a minipc is always a better bang for your buck, the cheapest solution is the dusty old laptop sitting on the shelf at the back of your closet…

A larger sized used motherboard or even a new cheap one often has more capability if you can deal with something that is larger…

Going directly against your ask: a raspberry pi 3b is cheap and has what you need. :)

I run a RockPro64 with Arch Arm. No need for a monitor - you just connect over SSH.

It always starts small. I started with a 15 year old pre-ryzen AMD laptop, and an old external USB 4TB hard drive. NEW the laptop was $299.

A year later, I have a ruckus/brocade managed switch, a Lenovo M700 Tiny running home assistant and Jellyfin, while my main media/file server is a Xeon E3-1275v3 with 2 SSDs, and 6 8TiB SAS3 enterprise hard drives in a ZFS pool. And a Pi5 running adguard home as my DNS server.

And I’ve already used 60% of it. 🤣🤣

I see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay

I’ve owned a few devices like Orange Pi but really more as a curiosity that I never did much with. I have, however, seen discussions suggesting that when you move away from the RasPi ecosystem, support for various tooling gets more complicated because you’re in a much smaller pool of hardware and this makes them more effort to setup. I don’t know the validity of that, but it sounded plausible to me.

Just get a Pi. Just because you don’t need wifi doesn’t mean it won’t potentially be useful down the road.

I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
Perhaps a similar device could work for you?

For a first machine a used Mac mini, especially one that precedes the T2 chip(although that’s not a deal breaker) is probably the best bang for the buck, solid hardware that will get what most people really want from a server unless they want a full on homelab, and they are easy to find cheaply on eBay. Also comes with the advantage of being able to run OSX with fewer hoops if you had a specific use case for that(running blue bubbles in the background or syncing to iCloud… mostly just convenience stuff if you have a leg in that ecosystem could also make a potential slow migration away less irritating)

If you can find a cheap NUC first tell me where because they are great options

Lenovo think centers can be found refurbed for under $100 too and will also be available for a long time because those fuckers were in every bank, hospital/drs office, and all manner of non-tech related offices for years and years.

Or you could be like me and jump two feet in with a used enterprise server, I dunno if I’d recommend this but I do know a lot more than I did when I started and have tons power and capacity to expand. And I’ve gotten more than enough use out of them to justify the $300ish I paid for my Poweredges plus electric bills. But do your research it took me a year to find documents on how to bypass the idrac drive virtualization bullshit and my power draw significantly dropped afterwards

As others mentioned used SFF PCs, here’s my recommendation based on my own experience.

I bought several used Dell Wyse 5070. The 5070 was announced in May 2018 and used as thin client.
They’re tiny, silent (no fan) and you can fit a NVMe SSD via adapter (PCIe A/E key -> M key) in the WiFi card slot next to a SATA SSD. I picked the ones with Intel Celeron J4105 (Quad Core) with 1.5GHz, up to 2.5GHz burst and put 32 GB RAM in one of them (that was before prices went nuts).
Beware, only if you pick the right dual ranked RAM modules (e.g. Patriot PSD416G26662S), you can have a max. of 2x16 GB. To start your journey, 4 or 8 GB might just be enough and don’t cost an arm and a leg.
Now I have a PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) running with several virtual servers and lxc, one 5070 hosts a PBS (Proxmox Backup Server) and both devices are far from their limit. In case of hardware failure I have spare 5070s.
Each 5070 cost around $65 and runs at around 8 watts at average. Dunno about current prices though.

It fits my needs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Maybe it fits your needs as well?

Get an old Android phone, possibly with a dead screen (bootloader must be unlocked). Flash PostmarketOS on it, or (if not supported) Termux. Its idle usage (with WiFi on, screen off) may be considerably less than 1w. It’ll have considerable amounts of CPU cores and RAM, more than a cheap VPS.

I actually have one of these: Dell Optiplex 3020 Micro

Has a 16 GB RAM max. Doesn’t come with HDMI but you can utilize one of these VGA/HDMI or Display port /HDMI

Surprisingly snappy little machines. Drop in another 8 GB stick of RAM for $25 and you’re off to the races.

Dell Optiplex 7020 SFF with the i7-4790 maxed out to 32 gb RAM are pretty nice too and can be found on Amazon for around $125.

This was just posted to selfhosted, and does a great job showing what RPi is competing with.

It’s a tool for seeing actual idle wattage draw for a lot of mini-PCs.

Many are in the single-digit idle power - the RPi claim to fame - but have a lot more capability than Pi, plus come in useful packages.

Just thought it would be a useful link for here.

If you don’t mind some low specs, and are focused on lowest price, a potato pi runs for about $30 IIRC, and is plenty to do small stuff like an openvpn server.

Dell 3060 Micro.