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When did stuff get into this state? VPS vs self-host
asterisk14
Member
I was just looking the + and - of self hosting and getting another VPS!
I have a number of thin clients that I use for running servers at home each consume around 10 watts.
When I bought them a few years I calculated that it would cost me <$10/yr in electricity to self host each of these thin clients and it was cheaper than a VPS with the same specs. I just calculated todays price and it is now >$26/yr. Electricity price in my country has go up and is around $0.25 per kWh including tax. In the past I used to also use old PCs as servers, no way I would do that NOW after this calculation! Time to buy some more VPS I think!
How many of you have done this calculation to work out how much your home servers are costing in electricity and switched them off?
Comments
Ouch. My residential rate is about $0.14 per kWh including delivery and tax. It was closer to $0.10 a few years ago. At $0.25/kWh it would cost me $~350/month just to cool my house.
I luckily haven't had to home host things for about 13 years now. Back then my biggest concern was network performance and cost. Between hardware maintenance, power cost/reliability, and the cheap cost of compute - Nowadays I don't think I'd home host anything other than a temporary test environment I couldn't be bothered to deploy on a VM.
Homelabs can be a great hobby though. If you're into that kind of thing, I think the extra cost and effort can be more easily justified.
@ 0.14€/$ KW/h Each 1Watt is ~0.10€/$ per month -- ~1.20€/Year.
So yeah electricity isn't cheap. At all.
When you run things 24/7.
Some of the newer N100 models idle at like 5w, and i guess this is where all the RPis and other SBCs come into play as well, they can idle at like what 1.5W?
While i still pretty much ignore the cost of electricity for a lot of things i wouldn't really consider selfhosting. On one side is my internet connection is pretty modest (which i intend to keep it this way because in this case modest also means cheap, flexible and hassle free) and i very much enjoy having to keep shit running be someone else's problem.
Doesn't really have to be especially new, there's a lot embedded boards by now that run on very, very little and some aren't even expensive. It's all a question of how much computing power is needed.
https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/hware/hardware.shtml
Even an almost 10 year old Celeron will run on 3W and that list is nowhere near complete.
Don't feel to bad. I'm at 0,28€/kWh right now and that's actually because prices have come down. Last year it was 0,46€/kWh. Still pretty much sucks.
The American mind cannot comprehend European energy costs. Sucks indeed.
All of my power comes from the TVA which charges around 0.08-0.09 US cents per kwh depending on the time of year. Guess that's the benefit of having a ton of nuclear plants and dams.
Noone should.
I just went thru my invoices...
In the span of 2 years I spent $420 of real bucks on Azure cloud computing, + $200 in free credits, + $300 in google cloud computing free credits, plus the Oracle free instance... All to rent CPUs time. I plotted the depreciation cost over time, running my own hardware in my basement would be more expensive. How stupid.
It depends on the server. In this low-end community a simple NanoPi Neo with a 4GB MicroSD for boot partition and 2TB attached USB HDD running 24/7 is considered as a server.
On other side: KVM VPS was created precisely to split the huge costs of a dedicated server on provider's side.
What you want depends on what you need or your usage.
How much do you use per month?
Where we live the electricity is sub metered (company buys in bulk and resells it at a markup) with the rate currently at $0.2074/kWh. We use around 700kWh in the summer and over 1000kWh in the winter months (all electric). We are moving at the end of our lease...the default rate directly from the power company is $0.1132/kWh. My January bill was $342.52 because they said we used 1634 that month (rate was 0.2014 then, it keeps going up every single month). I couldn't imagine having to pay €0.46/kWh in an all electric cheaply built place like I live in now.
It somewhat depends but on average likely something around 250-300kWh. Which isn't really that hard to achieve as there's no air conditioning (it's something between uncommon and non-existent around here in general) and heating runs on oil. Well, at least until oil finally gets outlawed but if that happens i'll probably "just" switch to central heating based on wood (or wood pellets) as for some crazy reason that got classified as green energy because it's regenerative... things are pretty stupid around here.
I self hosted some simple apps for my own and close family/friends usage on a small N100 box. The performance is much better than my old Pi 3 B+, with better compatibility due to its being a x86 machine. The increase is electricity usage is not noticeable at all. So yeah loving it.
But running a Ryzen 9 machine 24/7 at home? No thanks. Xeon or EPYC server? Hell no.
I'm self hosting some stuff on this beast
It consumes <1w idle (~2w with external 2.5 HDD) and ~6w full load
Even with rising electricity prices in Europe, I can afford it.
That said, it doesn't stop me from renting more servers than I need for my hobbies. (Even for professional activity sometimes)
So... I think it's better if I don't talk about the economic rationality of all my purchases.
Absolutely. For some things i just don't tend to think about them a whole lot. As long as it doesn't bankrupt me and i enjoy it it's fine. Period!
Wow. I don't think in my country electricity has ever been so low in 20 years.
I used to use a old P2 350Mhz machine for voip, usenet/torrenting and media server back in the day to my Xbox (the first version) with UnleashX installed. I used to leave it on 24 hours a day so it would downlaod overnight so I could watch free movies after work.
Even 3W here means approx $10/year. I bought 4 of the 10ZIG around 7 years ago second hand for around $30 in total as I calculated that it would be cheaper than renting VPS. But now I think it's the opposite even with the high cost of IPv4.
I pay just around $0.30 per kWh which is a bit lower than what it was 6 months ago.
I did a similar calculation about 10 years ago and started self hosting as power was cheap and there's little to no depreciation when you buy old thin clients/PCs. Heck many businesses used to give them away as it was cheaper than re-cycling them.
The Pi devices are quite costly. My break even point would be too long in the future.
Won't last long is my guess.....I heard in some EU countries they banned burning wood (?Germany), but as more people start doing it they will be more oppressive about this, they'll say it harms environment/smoke/deforestation, etc like they tell Holland farmers that they have to kill their cows due to their high Co2 emission but then the same people do a kaboom on Nordstream releasing 0.5-1.5million tons of Co2.
I didn't think about it either, for past many years I used to have TV on 12 hours a day in the background (135W 42" Plasma) whilst I worked (that's close to $200/year just on that!). My combined gas and electricity used to cost approx $1000/year, now it is closer to $3000/year and my salary is not increased at all over this time, so that means I am $2000 poorer every year. I haven't even calculated the extra for food/petrol/etc.
True but then you can customize the little boxes to your hearts liking. I still wouldn't run them for actual hosting tasks but they make nice NASs, routers and so on.
While i'm usually pretty negative in that regard too i think pellet/chopped wood based central heating appliances are pretty safe for now. It'll take years and years to get the current reform implemented and as the political tide is turning around here chances are it's more probable that the current regulation is going to be (partly) rolled back than more bans being added (the result is already chaotic and disorganized enough...). The people deciding on this have no clue in regards to the technologies available anyways (pretty obvious when you understand just a tiny bit about heating systems in general and simply listen to their ideas and supposed solutions). They just know that oil/gas is evil(tm) and that's pretty much it.
Wood in general didn't get banned. It's basically just some old stoves and even with those there's a lot of exceptions (from what i gather it's perfectly possible to legally install stoves fully unregulated if you know what to look for). Of course the whole thing is still pretty stupid but at least for now stoves aren't going anywhere and like i've said above it's somewhat doubtful that in the nearer future there'll still be the political majorities needed to push these kind of regulations. Obviously there's other shit coming (fighting left and right to keep the roof over your head has more or less become business as usual after all) but even there reality seems to slowly kick in.
Yeah, the margins are getting slimmer. That's pretty true. The thing is that my (personal) consumption is already pretty modest outside a couple guilty pleasures. Sure, i could cut down on those too but as long as it isn't some kind of life or death situation i don't really want to.
I think in a way the only practical option these days is to increase cash flow as prices rising is probably not going to stop any time soon, so trying to counter them by applying moderation is only going to work for so long and at some point there'll be nothing left to cut requiring additional income anyways.
You aren’t banned but your totally not @bsdguy btw
Absolutely and you are also totally not stupid. Go ahead, keep pushing this nonsense. If you repeat it often enough i might start to think that proving you wrong would be an amusing past time
Lmao bruh, come on. You joined in November of 2023 and already have nearly 3,000 comments. You dropped like 200 comments in the first week you joined and made it obvious you were an alt.
Your writing syntax, interests and everything matches @bsdguy perfectly -- who do you think you're fooling? Do you think the admins don't know?
It's not even that deep, I don't get why you don't just use your main.
For some reason i seem to attract psychotic people like a three day old puddle of dog diarrhea attracts flies. I mean, don't get me wrong, enjoy your delusions if they make you happy but just don't expect me to take you overly serious.
Sounds exactly like what @bsdguy would say 💀
i m have love conspirations
Enjoy psych ward.
That's good. My love is sadly rather constipated today it seems.