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Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

I'm still not convinced that self hosting is cheaper though.

Where I live, both the electric grid and Fibre connections are unreliable, and the ISP charges about $3/month for a static IP. Assuming 2.5W for a RPi, it takes 1.8kWh a month, costing around $0.25 for electricity. This also has the downside of using residential IPs, having to deal with CGNAT/NAT if the ISP has no static IPs, exposing your home IP, slow disk speeds in SBCs, etc.

Services like Hetzner have private servers for almost the same amount, which gives you faster storage, server IP addresses (for email reputation), DDoS protection, and a whole lot more to sweeten the deal.

The only thing I self host today is a script that runs on my OpenWRT router, that uploads the probed data from my inverter and BMS to monitor my PV setup. I look forward to get rid of it too, once I get better BMS/Inverter.

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Costs for hosting a static site or something with minimal computation is down to 0 at this point using any one of a dozen cloud/edge providers, so it's hard to compete with them on the basis of cost. The arguments for self hosting are really about having full control over your service stack.

The problem with a lot of these solutions is they have a nearly vertical complexity curve as soon as you want to get past a static site or minimally dynamic site.

> The arguments for self hosting are really about having full control over your service stack.

This is why I do the portion I host at home. That, and keeping the data on machines I actually own and control.

Self-hosting becomes much cheaper when you need big machines. A system with, say, 64G RAM will cost to buy outright about the cost to rent such a system in the cloud for a couple of months. I run a few test boxes (that are used by my team) in my garage for this reason.

I deployed a GRE tunnel to a small box I rent from Hivelocity that has a /26 routed to it, to work around lack of proper connectivity from a "business" HFC connection to said garage.

I think self hosting may be cheaper for huge data volume stuff? Like I serve (legal) video, audio, audiobook, book, and photo content, it amounts to around 20TB of content. It cost me around... 1k in capital for all the components for it, most of which went to the harddrives? And according to the self hosting people on reddit I'll probably need to swap a drive every few years, around 150 bucks a pop. Beyond that though my only cost is electricity, for which I have no idea but our monthly electric bill total is like 80$/month anyway so I'm not stressed about it.

Anyway I'm not paying in/out costs or costs for static hosting. Looking at hetzner's offerings it apears to be 536.58 euros/month for 10tb of storage? That's block storage on SSD, maybe they have cheaper HDD storage somewhere?

Point is I think my server setup may have "paid for itself" (not that it makes me money) after one month. And that's for 38TB total of RAIDZ1 space, I'm only filling 20TB so far of it. In actually it's like 60 something TB of space lol I just wanted RAID so I could lose a drive. I've got plenty of room to grow and swap components as needed.

> Assuming 2.5W for a RPi, it takes 1.8kWh a month, costing around $0.25 for electricity.

Note that it's virtually free in winter (or cheaper if you have a heat pump or only heat during off-peak hours) as the energy used by the RPi is that much energy not consumed by heaters

And you don't need to pay for a static IP adddress. Just front it with Cloudflare and have a cron job to update your A record regularly via the Cloudflare API.

As mentioned in the blog post. I wouldn't probably put a "real" production app on it so easily. You can replicate the same effect and more on a service like hetzner. But if you have a Raspberry Pi laying around and like 2-3 hours. At least a blog is enough! And the amount of hardware related things you'll learn is massive.

I've been running a few web bootcamps in the past. Explaining the hardware part through cloud admin panels is extremely hard. Having a physical thing right in front of you is spoko simple. Much easier for people to *click.

Self hosting can allow your budget to go much further. Tiny PCs like Intel NUCs or Lenovo Thinkcentres[1] are very light on power usage. I bought one that idles at 10 watts, which is $10.32/yr for me (assuming I never power it off). I bought it on Ebay and upgraded it to 32 GB memory for a total cost of $250. The cheapest comparable server on Hetzner costs around $36/mo so I break even in less than a year.

For production purposes, a public cloud has many benefits you can't get at home. But for hobby purposes, keeping the cost low is most important for me.

1. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thi...

I got a 15 watt Intel NUC for free as a business discard. It has an NVMe, 16GB DDR4, and a spinny 1TB SATA drive for backup. My ISP hasn't gone down or made me change addresses in years, but I'm waiting on that day so I can have Copilot write me a script to automatically update my DNS settings in Cloudflare (with DDOS protection) every 5 minutes via cron so I don't have to explore the world of DDNS again.

OTOH, if you have to deal with double NAT, good luck with that hot garbage.

It's cheaper for me. I do pay for a DDNS service, but that's very cheap. The machine doing the serving is one that would be running 24/7 anyway, so there's no additional electricity.

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