I’ve been running a small self-hosted Nextcloud for a while and kept the hardware cost low by buying secondhand straight from Japan, where the domestic used market for small-form-factor PCs and drives is huge and genuinely cheap. Sharing some field notes in case it’s useful to anyone speccing a home box.
What works well as a Nextcloud host
- SFF / USFF desktops — Fujitsu Esprimo, NEC Mate, HP ProDesk/EliteDesk Mini, Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny. Quad-core, 8–16 GB, a slot for a 2.5" SSD plus a spot for a data disk; they idle low and handle Nextcloud + a database + previews fine for a household.
- Thin clients — HP t630/t640, Fujitsu Futro. Fanless and tiny for a minimal instance or a reverse proxy.
- Secondhand 2.5" SSD / NVMe — the Japanese used market is flooded with pulls; cheap for the system disk (keep your data on something you trust + backups, obviously).
Caveats I hit
- Voltage: domestic Japanese gear is 100 V / JIS plug. Most SFF/laptop PSUs are 100–240 V (a plug adapter is enough) but check the label first.
- Junk / ジャンク listings are cheap but sold “untested” — read the description and budget for the occasional dud.
- Sellers are almost all domestic-only and won’t ship abroad, so you need a proxy to buy and consolidate several units into one parcel.
I route these through OneMall (proxy buys domestically then consolidates); the low per-order fee means even a cheap mini-PC is worth importing once it’s boxed with a couple of SSDs. Rough starting searches I used:
- Mini PCs: Mercari from Japan - OneMall Japanese Proxy Service
- SSDs: Mercari from Japan - OneMall Japanese Proxy Service
What is everyone else self-hosting Nextcloud on? Curious whether anyone else imports secondhand hardware instead of buying new or renting a VPS.