[logotype]

My old trusty Dell PowerEdge R720 in the utility room at home. It works fine, and powers everything from web hosting to locally running LLM's. It would have costed a fortune running the equivalent compute capacity in any of the big 3.

[mekster]

How do you handle hardware failures or screw ups for the server to go offline?

When I saw one of my server not coming back up at home for some reason on a reboot, I realized I needed spare hardware to reliably operate them. I can't let it stay offline while I order for the spare parts to arrive, even though I have backup data ready elsewhere to be restored.

Agree that cloud is too expensive these days. When you realize buying a server with 32 GB memory with 1TB nvme is only $250 (apparently no virtual neighbors bugging for your resource) and you're meant to pay that same price monthly to be on the cloud, it starts to feel like a joke.

[logotype]

Uptime for the last 3 years has been >99%. 1. Keep spares (esp. fans and drives). Hot swap if needed. 2. Dual ISP (1Gbit/s primary, auto switch to Starlink if primary link fails). 3. Keep a separate server for testing. Actually I lied, I test things in prod, sue me.

The monthly AWS bill is roughly 5 USD and consists of Route53 only!