Is it a bad idea to use my desktop to self host?
What are the disadvantages?? Can they be overcome?
I use it primarily for programming, sometimes gaming and browsing.
It’s a terrible idea - do it anyway. Experimentation is how we learn.
If you have a reasonably modern multi-core system you probably won’t even notice a performance hit. The biggest drawback is that you have a single thing that is holding all your eggs. So if an upgrade goes wrong, or you’re taking things down for maintenance then everything is affected. And there can be conflicts between required versions of libraries, OS, etc. that each service needs.
Separating services, even logically, is a good idea. So I’d recommend you use containers or VMs to make it easier to just “whelp, that didn’t work” and throw everything away or start from scratch. It also makes library dependencies much easier to deal with.
So I already host a lot of stuff on a raspberry pi 4B. But when I tried to host Jellyfin, encoding was trouble on it, so I used my desktop to host Jellyfin as a quick solution, but using sshfs from the raspberry pi to access the media files. So now I wonder, is it worth it moving Jellyfin to something else? Is it worth it moving the media files to the desktop?
It’ll effect performance. It will need to be always on. It risks having interaction between your normal applications and server services. Also all your eggs in one basket if something goes wrong. That said it shoul be fine. Just take frequent snapshots and backups for important data
