For media hosting, you can go an incredibly long way without needing to dip into “server grade” hardware.

An old desktop with a GPU and plenty of storage will be just fine, especially if you are only serving a few clients.

ECC isnt really that important, you’ll likely never notice if you get a memory error.

The one major advantage desktop PC hardware has is power usage and noise. They are generally quiet and reasonably power efficient, which matters a lot.

My advice would be to start small on an old desktop, and then upgrade when you actually hit a limitation of your current hardware.

Pretty much software. Servers predominately run services that other computers use (web server, file server, etc). PCs may run some of those things as well, which blurs the line, but the software they run is meant for direct usage by the end user (word processing, browser, media player).

Hardware wise, at the high end, the hardware is definitely different, but there is a lot of cross over at the mid and low end. The self-hosting community use a lot of consumer grade PCs as their server hardware.

Do it

The other possibility is that its 2 hexbearites who are trying to save the site, not realising they are bidding against each other. Would be pretty silly if that was it.