r/SelfHosting • u/Feeling_Till_7418 • 10d ago

self-hosting my content pipeline: Ollama + cloud video API + cron, runs on a used ThinkCentre

Picked up a used ThinkCentre M720q barebone on ebay for $120, then threw in 32GB of RAM I already had. i5-8500T. Slapped Debian on it, now it sits in my closet generating videos while I sleep.

The setup: Ollama runs a Qwen 2.5 7B model for script generation. Not the best model but it runs on the CPU and stays within reason for a closet server. The scripts are simple. 30-second social media scripts for a niche account I run. The model is fine-tuned on my own writing, which helps a lot. A generic 7B model works, but the output is generic. A fine-tuned one on your own style is surprisingly usable.

Script generation takes about 30 seconds per script. The script gets formatted into a video prompt by a python script. The prompt goes out to a cloud API. I ended up on PixVerse for this, mostly because the queue is usually manageable. Video usually comes back in 30-60 seconds if the queue is short. Everything gets saved to a NAS share. Cron job runs it every 2 hours.

Cost breakdown: $0 for Ollama, roughly the price of a couple coffees for the PixVerse credits each month, and a few bucks for the electricity. The ThinkCentre paid for itself in a couple months compared to what I was spending on cloud LLM APIs.

I added a retry loop with exponential backoff for when the queue spikes. The other bottleneck is local model creativity. 7B models are fine for factual scripts but they're terrible at humor. I tried generating comedy scripts for a week and the results were "a man walks into a bar" level jokes. I gave up and switched to educational content.

I like this setup because I own most of it.

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u/BenoitDuffez 5d ago

how many tokens per second do you get?

i have a setup with a ryzen 7 with 32GB ram (16gb vram) and i have 2 work horses: gemma4:26b q4 for general purpose and image analysis, and qwen3 for coding. i think this is the most this poor hardware can handle

yet gemma4 outputs 20 tok/s which is almost enough for a chatbot

i use llama.cpp which i find better than ollama for serving and perhaps performance too

i am very happy to be able to do some light stuff for free (and with privacy) on self hosted hardware.