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Comment by mortify | Hacker News Reader

For the home NAS, Assume a 5-6 year lifespan for the drives so in those 10 years you will spend another $100.

Of course this assumes you just need storage while a NAS can provide other services allowing you to consolidate calendars, shared note-taking, password managers, etc.

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Are the economies of scale really that aggressive here? A feature-rich cloud solution ending up cheaper than self-hosted by around 10% just using napkin math?

No one would spend $450 on a NAS and then put 2 TB drives in it. My NAS was $450 and has 3 18TB drives with another slot not yet used. The drives were $250 each or so on sale. So for $750 + $450 I have an always-on home server that runs my home automation, DNS Adblock, local webservers, media server with hardware transcoding, ip cam to HomeKit adapter, a Nintendo switch homebrew e-shop, a software controller for my Omada network, a Tailscale node to access my home network from anywhere, and many more services, AND it has _36 TB_ of storage with parity so it’s safe from a single drive failure. I replicate everything important to an 18TB external drive on a PC with Backblaze Personal which gives me offsite backups of 18TB+ for $60 a year. Nothing is really competitive with this if you have a lot of data you want to keep (my wife has a lot of video content for her work.)

This also adds to the cost. You start looking at 1-2k in equipment minimum for a good amount of space, and it adds up fast. Best way to get that more storage, but it's not cheap.

If you go cheap, you could probably cut the cost of self-hosting in half in terms of obvious cost. The cheaper you go the higher the maintenance tends to be though, so it may not be a real win.

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