My advice would be setup alerts on eBay for “servers”, “R730XD” etc and for sellers like “total_iceX”, “computer hive” other sellers you find (asset recovery and e-recyclers are the best as they often have lots of servers to sell so bargains come up more). You’ll get daily emails and good deals will come up.

If it were me, I would look at something like an R730XD or HP DL380P Gen 9. You can always get a slightly cheaper one and upgrade RAM/CPU and add more HDD/SSD to your liking. Important to bear in mind however, HP servers are quite finicky when it comes to non-HP stuff. So if you try to put a non-HP disk in the front, it either will work but will constantly flash the warning lights at you, or it will send the system fans to 100% until you remove the drive (my DL360P Gen 8 did that a lot). None of my Dell’s have ever had that problem though.

Deals can be had for sure, I’ve gotten an R320 for £7 before, and I recently got another R620 for £25. The Rx30 series are more expensive but I’d say for £400 you could probably get 2 (or one and fill all 24 drive bays and add a GPU for transcoding 😁).

Back to the future reference

I use Ubuntu server, it’s great and seems to just work with absolutely everything, is very reliable and it’s somewhat lightweight.

Going forward, when I need lightweight VM’s I am exploring using Alpine (not completely decided yet). But overall, Ubuntu Server is great!