As someone who works in software and product, I’ve been learning more about the hardware/infrastructure side of computing in recent months. Even if the knowledge doesn’t directly impact my day-to-day, I think having a decent understanding of general computing is a helpful skill set to have in my line of work.
I decided that a good place to explore would be to try to make a budget-friendly server for my home.
My first thought was to use a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as a Pi-hole server. This did technically work, but it was slow, clunky, and couldn’t really run any other services. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me to have an entire machine (even one as small as a Pi Zero) for just one service.