Running 7 Services on a Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF

The €80 Server

When people picture a homelab, they imagine a rack full of blinking servers humming in a basement. Mine fits on a shelf and sips power like a lightbulb. It's a Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF — a small-form-factor office PC I picked up used for around €80.

Here's what's inside:

• CPU: Intel Core i5 (4 cores, plenty for containers)
• RAM: 16GB
• Storage: SSD for the OS + larger drive for media
• Power draw: Idle around 15-20W — cheaper to run than most gaming consoles

That's it. No ECC RAM, no Xeon, no rack. And it runs seven services without breaking a sweat.

The Operating System: ZimaOS

Instead of bare Ubuntu or Proxmox, I went with ZimaOS (built on CasaOS). The reason is simple: it gives me a clean web UI for managing Docker containers, storage, and backups — without living in the terminal for every small task.

# ZimaOS handles Docker under the hood,
# but you can still drop to the shell anytime
docker ps -a

The Seven Services

Here's everything running on this little box:

How It's Exposed

This is the part most people get wrong. I do not forward any ports. Everything reaches the internet through a Cloudflare Tunnel, which means:

• Zero open ports on my router
• My home IP is never exposed
• Free SSL and DDoS protection

I wrote a whole post about migrating to Cloudflare Tunnel if you want the details.

Resource Usage

People always ask "can it handle all that?" Here's the honest answer: yes, easily. Most of these services idle at near-zero CPU. The only time things get busy is when Jellyfin transcodes a 4K stream — and even then the i5's QuickSync handles it in hardware.

# Typical load
$ uptime
 14:32:01 up 47 days,  3:18,  load average: 0.18, 0.22, 0.19

47 days uptime, load average under 0.25. This machine is bored.

Why Small Hardware Wins

The homelab community loves to overbuild. Massive NAS units, multiple nodes, 10GbE networking — it's fun, but it's overkill for most people. If your goal is to stop renting your digital life — block ads, stream your media, sync your files, automate your home — a single used office PC does all of it.

Start small. You can always grow later. But you might find, like I did, that you never need to.

What's Next

I'm planning to add Immich (self-hosted Google Photos alternative) next, and maybe a proper backup strategy with restic. But for now, seven services on €80 of hardware is a setup I'm genuinely happy with.