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>> host it close to metal as possible

Wouldn't it be less efficient to host something myself than to use some cloud provider?

I moved all my stuff to a home server, it pulls about 45W and costs me roughly £5/m in electricity costs. It will take about 2 years for me to recoup the hardware costs with savings over what I was previously paying for a VPS.

The one major improvement over renting a VPS is that I've now got a large RAID array with many terrabytes of storage, where I previously only had a few hundred gig to play with.

You're saving money, but this doesn't necessarily translate to energy savings, the excess you were paying was overhead for the VPS company.

While a server in a typical DC would use way more power than a home system, it's also theoretically possible that they are running at near 100% load, meaning all that energy is used doing SOMETHING, whereas your home PC is burning watts at idle.

You can use a single bare-metal server for 20+ services. I've done it and it's a solid setup (with minor exceptions). Plus, that's what cloud providers do anyway.

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