I am several months into the self-hosting journey and I feel I have outgrown my Pi 4 B 8GB. I’m only running around 3 dozen containerized services and it seems to struggle to keep up. But I’m not sure of the best bang for my buck. I’d like good, long-term performance, but I don’t really have a grand lying around for a Lenovo Tiny or Dell Optiplex or ASUS NUC. I’m thinking of buying an SSD to boot from, but will this even help much? For $350-500, could I make a more cost effective homeserver upgrade?
My suggestion is to either recycle an old pc/laptop or find one on craigslist for $100 and use the rest of the money to take your husband/wife out to a nice dinner.
Pretty much anything built in the last 15 years will be a big upgrade from a Pi.