[8fingerlouie]

> I had fun doing this until I had kids.

As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm and a leg, so i had to do "something".

I completely stopped self hosting anything "publicly" available. Everything moved to the cloud including most file storage, using Cryptomator for privacy where applicable.

The server got reduced to a small ARM device with the prime task of synchronizing our cloud content locally, and making backups of it, both remote and local. As a side bonus it also runs a Plex server off of a large USB hard drive. All redundancy has been removed, and my 10G network has been switched off, leaving only a single 16 port POE switch for Access Points and cameras.

The Synology boxes now only comes online a couple of times every week to take a snapshot of all shares, pull a copy from the ARM device, after which it powers down again.

In the process i reduced my network rack power consumption from just below 300W to 67W, and with electricity prices for the past year averaging around €0.6/kWh that means i save around 2050 kWh/year, which adds up to €1225/year, or just over €100/month.

Subtract from those savings the €25/month i pay for cloud services and i still come out ahead. On top of that i literally have zero maintenance now. My home network is only accessible from the outside through a VPN. The only critical part is backups, but i use healthchecks.io to alert me if those fail.

I still kept the network seggregation, so everything "IoT" is on it's separate VLAN, as well as the kids. The only major change was that the "adults" VLAN is now the management VLAN. I have no wired computers, so maintaining a management VLAN over WiFi was more trouble than i could be bothered with :)

Why are the kids on their own VLAN/WiFi ? Because kids wants to play games with their friends, something the normal Guest network does not support. Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira, and i didn't feel like doing the maintenance on that. So instead my kids have their very own VLAN with access to just printers, AirPlay devices and the Plex server.

[Terretta]

> As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

This is the principle I.T. departments fail to grasp.

> Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira...

Curiosity: while vira is arguably less wrong, hackers of a certain age would have expected viri or virii, which are more wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in...

From Tom Christiansen, of Perl fame:

http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/virus.html

// Meanwhile, in "Kids also brings" – I fully support what you did there!

[8fingerlouie]

> Meanwhile, in "Kids also brings" – I fully support what you did there!

It of course also helps that in 2023, literally all school work, for better or for worse, is done through the cloud. I wrote printers above, and yes, they do have access to the printers, but apart from our 3D Printers, the laser/inkjet printers have seen very little use.

Here the schools use Microsoft, which means assignments are done in Word/Excel, and handed in online either through a school portal, or shared from OneDrive.

I won't get into the privacy details, but we do have some fairly strict laws concerning kids and identity protection (a thing that recently got Google kicked out from the educational sector), so while not ideal it is probably not as bad as it sounds.

Apart from school work, their needs are mostly only local peer to peer networking for games, and/or internet access, and all can be accomplished by simply sticking them on a "less restricted" guest network, while at the same time making reasonably sure they're not wiping out the rest of the households computers :)

The firewall also runs a very small subset of IDS/IPS rules, mostly concerning malware/bot rules, and we use a NextDNS profile per subnet to filter out the worst.

> Curiosity: while vira is arguably less wrong, hackers of a certain age would have expected viri or virii

My bad, i used the latin plural form of virus, which is vira. In any case, my network setup should keep most vira, viruses or virii out :)

[grepfru_it]

I hosted email until my email to a college student was rejected with no way of contacting either him or the admins of his school. That was the straw on the camels back.

I still self host apps today but my hardware is old enough that it costs more in power and cooling than what I get out of it, and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means

[8fingerlouie]

> and the roi on new hardware doesn’t justify the means

That was my takeaway as well, considering that a 4 bay synology uses more in electricity than purchasing the same storage in the cloud (up to a certain point, datahoarders need not apply).

On top of that i then need to purchase new hardware every 3-6 years if i want reasonable assurance that my data is still there, and doing the math on a 5 year TCO, i would end up paying around double what i pay now, and still have worse data integrity.

I haven't done the math on where the breakaway point is, but i have around 10TB of cloud storage (including backups), as well as DNS services, static web hosting, mail, and a few other curiosities, and i average €25/month on cloud services.

Comparing that to a 4 bay synology with 4x6TB WD Red drives, you end up with €1276 in hardware costs (current prices here). Over a 5 year period that's €21.2/month for the hardware alone. Assuming the Synology draws 10W, and each WD Red draws an average of 5W, that's 30W of power, totalling around 22 kWh/month, which at €0.6/kWh adds up to an additional €13/month.

So in total around €35/month to self host what i can host in the cloud (including backups!) for €25/month.