HP/Lenovo/Dell workstation tiny/mini/micro will be cheaper and better supported. Price-wise, I’ve set up 4-5 reasonably powerful t/m/m machines for the cost of my M2 Mac mini.

Which is nice for some of the development work I do, but for a server I personally won’t use anything other than Linux, and I wouldn’t recommend anything else either. Apple adds some funkiness that can be a complete pain (IMO) with some tools, Linux is the only server solution worth using.

So if you want a Mac, go for it, but if you want a server as the most important part, I’d say get an x86 based bit of hardware.