I would definitely recommend consumer grade hardware for a small home server, I ran older server gear (dual e5645+42GB ram) and found it to be loud and power hungry, especially at idle. Moved over to only slightly newer consumer stuff (i5-3470+8GB ram) and it still did what I needed it to, without costing $40AUD a month to run.

8GB of RAM is perhaps a bit limiting at times but I’ve not yet run into any critical issues because of it. I wouldn’t want to try simultaneous, high bit-rate transcodes on it but aside from that it’s been fine for my use case.