[aftbit]

My rack draws around 750W at mid-idle (not totally idle but not doing anything big either). I have about $0.14/kWh delivered electricity cost in southwest Ohio. This means the rack costs me approximately $77 per month or approximately $920 per year. That's not a particular small cost, but it is far less than I would pay to host the same things at a professional data center, or shivers the cloud.

If I really wanted to optimize for power efficiency, I could do much better. I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.

[znpy]

> I've seen decent homelab setups (with NAS, router, switch, and some slow compute nodes) that run under 100W, which would cost me only $10 per month in power, and would be far more powerful than a small DigitalOcean droplet.

I do some homelabbing at home and i do work for some "big tech". The difference, essentially, is reliability and high availability.

Most homelab posts i see are one decent (not even large) disaster away from losing everything.

I do something in that space at home, mostly around data backup and replication, but i am well aware that in case of decent disaster I'd probably be at least a couple of days offline (potentially up to one or two weeks).

Most people underestimate facet of the discussion.

[sgarland]

Agreed. Most people seem to take a very cavalier approach to backups, for example, or using risky Ceph/ZFS setups without understanding the consequences.

In the absolute worst-case scenario for me, barring a lightning strike that fried my UPS and entire rack, I would lose a day’s worth of changes, as my backup node kicks on daily to ingest snapshots. Downtime would probably be 15 minutes or so - boot up backup, change target IP address on other nodes to access it.

I’m only running RAIDZ1, so I’d have to lose two disks in a VDEV for this to occur. I understand and accept the risks, but were I hosting anything of import, I’d probably accept the additional power draw of keeping the backup server on 24/7 and stream snapshots to it continuously.

Also, of course, I’d be streaming those snapshots off-site. Currently I do so for things like photos and documents.

If I lost 2/3 of my compute nodes, I’d be down for a bit longer, as I’d have to shift workloads to the backup server (which is a dual socket with enough RAM to handle it), and currently it doesn’t run K8s. I can shift things to Docker Compose easily enough, or I suppose I could register it as a worker node that’s just tainted most of the time.

[Karrot_Kream]

I'm posting this just to compare power rates not to win an internet fight. My power bill is tiered, and at the lowest tier I'm paying double your rates ($0.28 / kWh.) Once I add a rack like that on I'd probably be bumping up to the next tier which will increase my power to something like 2.5-3x that rate. Because of the tiered system even my non-server load will be metered at a higher cost. It's really not worth it here to run servers at home if I'm not being highly power conscious.

[namibj]

Meanwhile in Germany, the tiers are the other way around: base fees and meter costs increase effective rate at the low-consumption end, while you end up with only (even discounted, somewhat, usually!) per-kWh rates dominating at high consumption. Industrial loads also get assessed for peak power sustained for like a few minutes at least once a year, to reflect capex/depreciation of sufficiently-overprovisioned distribution transformers and other related last-mile power-handling capacity. This is relatively negligible if you average over 10% of your peak draw, though. And even beyond, recent energy prices Matt have shifted the balance spot to even more-peaky consumption.

[doubled112]

I looked into cloud, but it's just not really feasible. It really is possible to do a lot with a little at home.

I'm using about 60-100W for my home-prod, and a lot of it is "older". I'm running about 15 small VMs at any given time these days, and probably 20 containers.

I think my biggest single draw is the Mikrotik CCR1036 in the garage, but it saved me from buying new gear. Sure there's a break even point with hydro, but that's years in the future when the device is free. It's also pretty fun to watch VPN connections testing at 700Mbps from home.

I don't really care about uptime, and I've got gigabit fibre to the house, so bandwidth isn't a huge problem. It worked fine on 300/60Mb cable too.

Ryzen 3 2200G, 32GB RAM, 1T NVMe, 10TB HDD. This one runs services.

Orange Pi 5 16GB with another 500GB NVMe. This runs redundant services and monitoring.