I had my home server on a pi and then an old laptop, and finally in a VM on my always-on Mac Mini. The hardware devices were nice for set-and-forget operation (

I had my home server on a pi and then an old laptop, and finally in a VM on my always-on Mac Mini. The hardware devices were nice for set-and-forget operation (especially the laptop, because the PSU acted as a UPS that kept it running during several power outages over the years). I like the VM rather than running it directly on the Mac because it's trivial to copy the VM to another computer when I want to change hardware. Obviously, your services will be unavailable whenever the host machine restarts.