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by 8fingerlouie 792 days ago
I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch.

Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month (€0.35/kWh)
3 comments
kjkjadksj 792 days ago
$6 vps probably has no storage. E.g 5tb hetzner box is more like $14 a month. Pis are absurd though for homelabbing today, prices have not fallen relative to other cheap compute. For the price of a $90 pi you can get a used mini pc with an i5 8500 with memory and storage on ebay today. Double that and you can get a new asus minipc with an 8 core 9700t. All with a case and psu. The asus minis are even designed to stack nicely as a cluster arrangement.
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nicolaslem 792 days ago
From my experience, being comfortable with networks and systems outside the cloud is a valuable skill that not a ton of people possess. It may be surprising to some of you, but there is an entire generation of syadmin/devops that have never touched a switch or a bare metal server.
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emanuele232 792 days ago
yup, i belong to the already-cloud generation, having a capable router+ a couple of raspberries have taught me a lot
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chadsix 792 days ago
When you put your data on a third party host, you can basically kiss it goodbye -- "trusting" that host means you have to trust every single employee in it.

For the peace of mind, I'd even pay more -- but it's significantly cheaper in the long run to self host since those 'cheap shared-resource' virtual servers are always oversold.

But to each his own.

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8fingerlouie 791 days ago
> When you put your data on a third party host, you can basically kiss it goodbye -- "trusting" that host means you have to trust every single employee in it.

Or you encrypt your data as well as backup your data somewhere else.

Besides, on the scale we're talking here, a workload that can be handled by 3 RPI's (or a VPS), do you really have such sentivie data ?

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