this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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Privacy
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You can also get an old PC without a gpu and hook it up to a domain via dyndns or similar. Or just wireguard to it. You'd have higher upfront costs, but very small running costs, so it will be worth it at some point and you fully controll the data on it.
Electricity isn't free and nor is your time, you are never going to beat commercial VPS hosters on price.
Looking at my bills, my cluster server costs me ~15€ per month in electricity.
It has:
As soon as you link me a VPS offer with comparable specs, but lower monthly cost, I am switching.
Those are not VPS specs, that is more the kind where you would get a dedicated hardware server at a hoster. Hosting your own becomes much more viable the larger your operation becomes.
Mkay, then lets check out a VPS equivalent then:
A raspberry pi 4, with an average CPU load of 100% 24/7 would draw ~4kWh per month, which would cost me 1,50€ per month in electricity.
Again, a cheap VPS with specs in the rpi4 range costst about 5€ per month. After about 1,5 years running a rpi4 would become cheaper than renting a VPS.
Edit: after calculating it myself, I found this tool online https://tools.picockpit.com/powercost/ which veryfies my napkin math.
Cloudserver might still be doing the $10 a year deal where you get a cpu core and some ram and hard drive space.
It’s hard to beat that price even if you already have the pi. And the vps runs amd64 binaries instead of needing everything built out for arm.
Well, how long do you expect the cluster to last, and how much did it cost? We need to factor that in to understand the true monthly cost of the cluster.
I expect it to last for over 10years.
It has been running for 2 so far.
The total material cost was somewhere between 800 and 1000€.
For comparison, here is an ARM vps https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/arm-server/ if you scroll down a bit and add 8TB block storage to it you can see that the storage alone would cost just shy of 100€ per month. That would rake up the same bill in less than a year.
Okay, so €1000 over 120 months, that's another €8.34/month, plus the €15/month in electricity costs. A total of €23.34/month.
So yeah, you're not going to get those specs at that price on a VPS today, but there are a lot of caveats here.
At least with a VPS you can rent only what you need when you need it, have a dedicated multi-gigabit network connection, and watch server specs increase and costs decrease as scalable hardware capacity improves over time, all while keeping your home network safely out of the picture.
all good points to consider for sure.
I won't go into all of them, but to summarize, it works perfectly for me.
The cool thing about a cluster is the upgrade path. It started with just two blades, but as I ran more docker containers and went out of resources, I just bought more. Am now up to 6 and there are still 2 free slots if I need it.
Storage I definitely overprovisioned but it will get used up eventually, that one is a bit more tricky to smoothly upgrade. Each blade has one nvme slot, but for bulk storage I have external raid enclosures, which is somewhat awkward.
Like you implied, it all depends on your need. If all you need is to run some private services, as OP is asking about, a bunch of SBCs or an old second hand office computer will do just fine and be very nicely priced compared to renting a similarly specced VPS.
If one forgoes contracts and is trusting, anybody can host their private files on my private, self-hosted servers. But only if it's sensitive documents. Like the stuff you wouldn't want to host at a standard online host.
Completely free, aint that just a sweet deal?
Personally I find time and money tertiary to privacy and would pay 10 times the standard rate for a truly secure host.
Unfortunately they don't exist so I learned to self host encrypted servers with VPN access on private infrastructure.
Beat use of time and money ever.
Which is why I said "on price". Obviously that is only one of the factors but don't kid yourself into thinking that your local server will ever be cheaper. It might have many other advantages but price just won't be one of them.
That's a load of crap. Anything you have to subscribe to will turn out to be more expensive than owning at some point. And even if that was not the case, the monetary value that you give your data is what should determine how much you should pay, up front or over time.