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Should I move from dedicated servers to homelab?
nameserver
Member
in General
I currently runs everything on OVH KS-2 and KS-LE-B, cost more than 400 USD per year. Should I use around 400 to 800 for a homelab PC?
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i personally run everything in my garage and then front with VPS at a few different providers. I have 2x ISP at home and then wireguard to connect everything up. I also managed to lease an IPv6 /48 and have Onidel announce this which has been pretty cool to have that public ip space available. my power cost is far more than 400 USD per year for cooling and rack power though...it depends on your needs and you would need to figure out what your actual costs would be
It's everyone's dream indeed
The concern is: handling traffic and attacks, possible fire, hardware issues and energy backup maybe more... But if you're only hosting your apps, you're always at home or designed well monitoring system and backup/coverage. Of course would be perfect for you.
We run everything in the house and have DNS records pointed at the home router.
Internet is $40/month and electricity is included in rent, so there's minimal cost.
Edit: please stop nmap'ing us.
It depends on how much you're willing to invest.
I would only self-host at home with a UPS, multiple ISPs with failover, enterprise hardware (ECC memory, enterprise drives) and good cooling.
That is expensive, and a home setup still carries more risk than a provider.
For critical services I would stay on dedicated servers(or veepeesss)
I went the other way around, homelab moved to full specs KS-LE-B. I have only kept a small NAS at home, and even that I don't really need.
Pretty happy with the setup. The monthly price is the final price, no electricity bill to monitor or 6483847 euro RAM sticks to buy as a spare.
Short answer, keep your dedis.
the coolest thing i ended up doing was having 2x isp and then 2x firewalls, each one having one of the physical ISP connections, then adding routing between both so they both can use either ISP as failover. has saved me a few times now...
That’s exactly the reason I keep my Synology powered off. Price of HDD is crazy these days.
If you are asking this, probably nothing critical runs there. Move it home, why overpay
selfhosting is fun, i just proxy via a vps over tailscale, unless i need something on 24/7 then maybe a vps would do. i would still spend more money on storage if i had the cash on hand and the market not being dumb atm
What are you running? Is it public or personal? What would happen if there's an outage (power or internet)? What is your internet bandwidth like? What are your power costs? And th list goes on...
I have a home lab but I also use both dedis and VPS. For dev/testing or most personal things that will just annoy me if it was down, 100% for a home lab. For "public" things, it's probably going to be a dedi/VPS. My previous place, the power would usually go out for a bit if there was a storm and comcast would randomly have outages at night weekly (besides possibly with a storm). My current place, the only power outage I've had is when they changed/upgraded the meters and comcast will go down about once a month. Comcast's upload speed sucks here though it's standable for just my personal stuff.
P.S. Besides just pc/server cost, you really need to have it on an UPS so there's going to be an additional cost...
I'm spending €516/yr on just my 3 kimsufi.. Can buy a lot of used Dell on ebay for that!
I was thinking to get a single 5700x, and power cost for that won't be so expensive, i don't think it will be fully loaded 24/7
Apps I use personally and some public website like portfolio. I am already routing everything through a single VPS with nginx.
I have good internet, no power outage, but its saving money while having some risks i guess
Depends. Do you need it on 24/7? Do you need it to have good connection to outside of your home?
A mini pc like those from Lenovo or HP will work fine, won't cost arm and leg, won't sip much power. The only issue is if your home internet is good enough for your use case.
Probably around how much the dedi cost for 1 or 2 years
do need it to be 24/7 and have good internet
only downside as others mentioned is the risk of things like power or internet outage
yeah I mean, ebay is your friend too. I use a 7302p with a supermicro chassis and board from an ebay seller. has enough pcie lanes for my gpus. way overkill some of the time but I needed the headroom. I have 1 jbod for primary storage that is zfs with a hba passed to a VM, 1 jbod for backup storage using mergerfs and independent disks, no stripe. then backup all my data to a storage vps encrypted prior to sending
Then I say go with the home lab. You can just use an old desktop or laptop (make sure to remove battery or cap the max charge % if supported) if you want but I've found minipc are nice (unless you need ecc or gpu).
BTW, black friday is coming up relatively soon and there's always some great deals if you're able to get them! Should be perfect for something like the portfolio/stuff that's more for the public while keeping costs down.
I am all for self-hosting, but I don't because I don't have reliable transit here.
My internet options are Starlink (which has rather limited uplink and I'd prefer not to put even more bandwidth over) and DSL that goes down when the power goes out. I would prefer a fiber ring to host anything serious.
I colocate up in Spokane which is about an hour and 45 minutes from me. This gives me great transit options and I can drive to it. I would rather have my own server shed with solar power, but the transit options are so poor by comparison.
I'll take cost as the essential factor here.
If you already had some hardware for a homelab setup, I'll say go for it, why not?
If you want cut the annually cost of thoz dedis, can you handle the rams and cpu in the current market? Man, the rams price are ....
i have fiber and coax but i have been looking at renting a quarter cab for a bit now...it becomes a hassle to always have this potential for an overheating cube in my garage with expensive equipment even with sensors and automatic shutdowns, etc. it sounds nice to put it all in a colo
some of ddr4 on places like facebook market is acceptable, but I would not go with ddr5
I just moved most part of my project to my basement from dedicated servers this year, leaving 1x mini pc colocated acting as “access gateway”, and several VPSes from multiple providers for reverse proxy. I racked 1x epyc 7763/512G and 4xE2286G/64G(DDR3) units in my cabinet, burning approx. 200kwh per month, 2*200Mbps uplink broadbands works totally fine for me, hosting the backend server of an 80K PV app. The servers are all built with consumer hardware, equipped with self-built PiKVM controllers for OOB, the cabinet also came up with an 2000KVA UPS for 30minutes power failure duration. Though my isp assign static IPv4 for my broadband, but I believe that CGNAT works for me as well.
It's a nice idea if you can make it work. I think the biggest concern is usually the internet connection, for a few reasons - reliability, not having a static address, getting banned from your ISP because you got DDOSed which triggers the ISP to notice you are running servers, and being unable to use the internet at home while you are getting DDOSed.
All of that can be solved by paying your ISP enough money. There are people and IT companies near you who pay for that. But do you want to have to negotiate a special internet contract?
I totally get that. I wouldn't want it in my garage. I have some acreage, so I would just build a shed for it. I think an open air vented shed could work here, but I haven't tested it. I'm not sure if servers will work between -30 and 100F.
Worst case, it might need some electronically controlled ventilation openings.
Part of the desire for me is that I would wire it up, probably with 24VDC batteries and solar. No inverter at all, PicoPSUs for the servers.
If a bit of downtime for residential power or internet loss isn't a concern why not? Personally I've kind of wished we had ISPs here in the US that let you BYOIP and shit. Look at it this way. A full rack in a DC with power and networking is like $1000~/m, maybe $700-800/m for a rack not near big cities. Outside of the city here you can mortgage a cheap house for $2k/m. Here in Texas you can use a power company that gives you a whole home battery backup system for free, so a free UPS power backup basically up to like 8kW.. For stuff like game servers it would probably work pretty well since they don't require 99,99 uptime like VPS.
One can dream at least.
Despite dedi have backup power, good network, etc... unless I have thing need critical uptime, I never trust any provider. Only data you own at your hand is your. Everything on dedi, vps, google, amazon etc... are their and they can lock you out if they want.
Almost every ISP on the planet will give you BYOIP, redundant connection, or anything else you want for enough money. Pretty much every internet connection everywhere is bespoke, even though they try to standardize as much as possible.
All the IP-layer stuff they can do in a DC they can usually do outside a DC. But you'll probably be on a worse physical layer unless you pay $$$$$ to build a new physical connection just for you. If you're lucky they have a spare fiber on your street they can assign to you. PON's not so terrible though. If they've only got DSL or cable, forget about running anything professional.
On the other hand, not everything has to be professional.
Try hybrid first. Keep KS-LE-B then move a few workload to homelab.
You cannot find any dedi at the price of KS-LE-B, either full spec or base spec. The cost should be much lower than home lab. In some countries, not even a cup of coffee cost.