The ones I just built are 64 core Threadrippers with Supermicro boards and 2U Supermicro chassis. I know they’re technically workstation processors, but if you’re only putting a single CPU in each server, they make really good server CPUs.

I built two of those to handle the workloads and have fault tolerance, then a third node that’s just a little mini PC running a Ryzen 5700G. That’s literally just there to fill out the Ceph cluster. He sits on a little rack mount shelf and does the work like a champ. His big brothers are very proud of him.

I’ve always been impressed with Supermicro’s quality. I considered a cheaper Asrock board, but Supermicro has never done me wrong.

Then for RAM, I stupidly went with Nemix this time. 22% failure rate on the sticks they sent me. And such a hassle dealing with their customer service, who sent me more bad sticks and told me they couldn’t find a problem with the sticks I sent back. Idk man, whichever system they were in wouldn’t boot. Put in known good RAM, and they would boot. Then the replacement sticks wouldn’t pass memtest. Whatever they’re doing to test their RAM is inadequate. Anyway, I returned that RAM and went with Micron, and now both systems are running great.

For the OS, I’m using Proxmox VE. I really like how easy it is to run high availability services with it.

$10k for the whole setup, but it sure beats paying $550 a month for cloud hosting on Digital Ocean.