Are there any technical/performance reasons why I couldn’t create an instance for myself and host a Plex server off of the same machine at home?

I’m fairly new to self-hosting in general, so any insight would be appreciated!

EDIT: I completely forgot to mention that this would be for a Mastodon instance, not for Lemmy.

  • aelwero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    6 months ago

    There’s no context to the question?

    At face value, no, there’s no technical reason you can’t run a Plex server and a lemmy instance on one computer :)

    • veee@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      21·
      6 months ago

      Oh shoot, I thought I included that this would be for a personal Mastodon instance.

      I was mainly curious to know if running both would somehow affect the performance of the other.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      The cheapest digitalocean VPS doesn’t have enough ram to host lemmy these days, especially after v0.19 update significantly increase database ram consumption. You’ll have to use a vps with at least 4 GB of ram which will cost $24/mo. If you only want to spend $5/mo for that kind of VPS, you’ll have to dig into lowendtalk.com to find some VPS deals from a somewhat reputable providers.

    • veee@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      From what I’ve read participating in the Federation does require some competent level of commitment. I might end up joining once the process matures a bit more and the barrier for entry is a little lower for complete novices like myself.

      Thanks for the service recommendation!

  • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
    62·
    6 months ago

    Lemmy often racks up hundreds of gigabytes in logs and other crap, chokes up the hard drive, and then force restarts the server. Not fun for something you use to stream media from. Takes quite some tuning to get it sorted.

    If we are talking about two virtual machines on the same physical server with dedicated storage allocation, that shouldn’t matter.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caEnglish
      8·
      6 months ago

      Lol Wat.

      Op, just budget 200gb for lemmy and you’ll be fine. Our entire lemmy.ca server is only using 100gb. It’ll be a good learning experience!

      Also, check out jellyfin as a possible alternative to plex.

      • veee@lemmy.caOPEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        I should have specified that I was interested in creating a Mastodon instance, not Lemmy, but I’m glad to know that I could do that should I want to build one.

        I’ve looked into Jellyfin as a secondary service. At the moment my parents have gotten used to navigating Plex and having them re-learn something new over the phone is…not something I have the energy or time for lol

        • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          I just set up a Jellyfin server and it is SOOO much easier to set up, navigate and use. Navigation because Jellyfin isn’t cramming their shows and personal streaming services down your throat and use because I have it self-hosted at my personal domain and I can create accounts for other people and just hand them a password.

          Honestly the Plex interface confused me, as a tech-savvy person. And every device I signed into I had to take out all the garbage and repin what I wanted.

          It’s even easier than Netflix because the interface doesn’t constantly change every time you open it.

          • veee@lemmy.caOPEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            As an example of my parents’ non-tech savvyness they have put off updating apps on their phones for years because they don’t trust that the updates are secure. I just don’t have the energy to act as a constant line of tech support.

            • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
              11·
              6 months ago

              Ya know, it’s a weird thing. There are only a couple of things I consider myself an expert in, and am regarded as such, as people ask me for advice, but then turn around and immediately disregard my advice, and later come to regret it, only to disregard my advice again later.

              People are strange.

        • Shadow@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Images aren’t federated, but their thumbnails are stored in your instance. You can prune those though as needed.

    • redcalcium@lemmy.instituteEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      It’s true, it logs a huge amount of stuff due to federation chatter. If you run it with docker, be sure to setup log rotation. I think the recommended lemmy ansible installation set the rotation to 50MB x 4 files. Or just /dev/null it.

  • TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.pageEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    I run Lemmy, Plex, and a bunch of other services from a desktop in my basement. It works great. The Lemmy docker setup is a little finicky but works well once you get it.

    • veee@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      My bad, I forgot to specify that I’d like to create a Mastodon instance, not Lemmy. Though it’s good to hear that people are having success.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
    English
    32·
    6 months ago

    Are you running Windows?

    Of so you can install Jellyfin to host your media library. Jellyfin is an alternative to Plex without the inline requirements.