I use a dedicated Raspberry Pi (5, previously had on a 4).

I host everything else on a different server, the HA one is dedicated. Pretty nice because then it can run HAOS and basically manages everything itself.

One factor in keeping it separate was I wanted it to be resilient. I don't want stuff to stop working if I restart my server or if the server dies for some reason. My messing around on my server is isolated from my smart home.

I also have a separate Pi (4, previously on a Pi 1B) that runs Pi-hole, on it's own Pi for the same reason - if it stops working or even pauses for a moment, the internet stops working.

Up until a couple of weeks I was running it on a dedicated Pi4. It's now running as a VM in ProxMox on a pair of Lenovo M710q mini PCs I got off ebay for £40 each.

I did load them up with RAM, upgrade the CPUs and add a second NIC so they probably came in at more like the cost of a 16Gb Pi5. Each. The RAM was the pricey part. I've measured the power usage and they each use about a 3rd more power than the Pi did which I'm happy with. Given that, the added flexibility of running ProxMox and how quiet they are I'm super happy with the setup.

Oh and I used to run PiHole on another Pi. That's gone now replaced with Technitium DNS running as a pair of VMs too. That was surprisingly easy to do.

Please note that Home Assistant is officially supported on Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 with 2GB of RAM minimum Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant

If your older rpi is for instance a rpi 3 with 512MB of RAM, I'm not sure it's going to cut it.

I have a proxmox host on a HP Elitedesk G3 with an i5 7500. In that I have a VM with HAOS and it runs like a dream. If something goes horribly wrong I can get remote terminal access from the proxmox interface along with rebooting and backing things up.

Also, you can actually run Grafana under HomeAssistant directly, though that does mean if HA is down then you also lose Grafana at the same time. IMO it is reasonable to use lots of stuff alongside HA but monitoring and remote access should be on a separate machine, and for that I have an old laptop (integrated battery so no need for UPS) and that machine is really only for managing remote access and monitoring.

NUC i7, 32gb ram. Full Docker stack includes home assistant and all relevant containers for it zigbee2mqtt, esphome, vscodium, sqliteweb, rtl_433, mqtt, kokoro_tts, weaviate, zwavejs, openwebui, ollama, paperless with ai capabilities, a1111, whisper, sync thing, searxng, redis, qdrant, postgres. Runs fine, however ollama starts to max it out as I want to go for bigger models, so looking for something with serious gpu oomphbut still small footprint and low power consumption

VM under TrueNAS

raspi 4 in a container.

basically running since the 4 was released

It’s hosted on Docker on Alpine Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s actually doing a trillion other things too and it’s not bogged down at all.

Home Assistant OS on Raspberry Pi 5. Simple and maintenance free.

Custom SFF PC. Ryzen 2700X, Gigabyte B450i, Intel A380, and some WD red plus drives.

I have a HP microserver running Debian and Docker. But it runs far more than just HA. It runs all my self hosted stuff except for my pihole.

3rd or 4th gen Intel NUC with an i5 and 16GB RAM. Running proxmox with 1 VM (Home Assistant) and about 10 LXC.

I'm hosting on an desktop PC. Basically my old machine, but freshly installed with Ubuntu server and a few HDDs added.

I moved home assistant from a raspberry pi 4 to a NUC a few years back with a few other services (ZigBee, mqtt, etc) and it's been fantastic. I'm also running frigate on the same system with a Google Coral for object detection and it handles the load of several network camera feeds well.

I host on a raspberry pi 4 in a Docker container. Ive added an ssd to the pi for longevity!

I upgraded from a Pi2 to a second hand thinkpad. It went from underpowered to also running a NAS and a factorio server with plenty of precessing power to spare. I've used it for several other projects as needed. Docker compose makes everything trivial.

Pi5 runs my reverse proxy and then all services run as docker containers on my battery stripped laptop I used in 2020.

The laptop mounts a raid5 HDD array that the pi5 maintains

Dedicated N100 mini pc. It has more than enough everything…. Except for whisper and other AI stuff. That’s a silly situation where whisper takes longer than the dedicated gpu (and mind you we’re talking RX 6400, not 5090) outputs the results.

A Dell 3140 laptop. With HA and a number of other apps it loafs along at about 5% CPU. When Frigate is enabled it jumps up to 14% or so while drawing between 6 and 12 watts. The battery prevents power blinks in our area from being a problem, unlike my Pi4 that crashed and didn't recover when I was hundreds of miles away. The battery lasts hours when the power fails and the keyboard and display are convenient.

For those concerned about the battery, it's firmware limited to a 70% charge so it will last years. Current Li-Ion batteries have about a 1 in a million chance of fire. A car parked in your garage is hundreds of times more of a risk.

It's been excellent and I'd buy it again.

Put my old PC on a 4U server case and have it in a rack (minus the GPU)... I also added a ton of RAM early last year (thank god). I'm probably wasting electricity but it's fine.. I can spin up anything and everything without issues which is nice compared to my old NUC and laptop servers that would crash frequently.

@ohlaph 14y old asus zenbook laptop (4 core, 4GB).
4 years without an issue.