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Have you seen the prices for Google Drive et al? The NAS setup you describe (which I wouldn't consider worth the money for that little space) is what, 12GB with 1 parity drive?

Google One for 10TB is 274,99€/mo (at least in my country) so you'd make the entire nas price and subscription cost within a few months, let alone years.

There just aren't compelling public cloud for large sizes (My NAS is 30TB capacity and I'm using 18 right now) and even if you go the more complex loops with like S3 and whatnot you still get billed more than it's worth. Public cloud is meant for public files, there's a lot of costs you're paying for stuff you don't need like being fast to access from everywhere.

The maintenance time is a bit overestimated if you keep it simple.

On my homelab, I update everything every quarter and it takes about 1 hour, so 4 hours a year is pretty reasonable. Docker helps a lot with this.

And I’ve almost never run into trouble in years, so I have very few unexpected maintenance tasks.

EDIT: I am referring to a homelab that is only accessible for private purposes through a VPN.

As a bare minimum, you should update your server and docker images daily, or at least whenever there's an update (which you won't know unless you check).

If you only access your homelab over VPN or similar, then by all means, update whenever you feel like it, but if you expose your services to the internet, you want to be damned sure there are no vulnerabilities in them.

The internet of today is not like it was 20 years ago. Today you're constantly being hammerede by bots that scan every single IPv4 address for open ports, and when they find something they record it in a database, along with information on what's running on that port (provided that information is available).

When (not if) a vulnerability for a given service is discovered, an attacker doesn't need to "hunt & peck" for vulnerable hosts, they already have that information in a database, and all they need to do is start shooting at their list of hosts.

You can use something like shodan.io to see what a would be attacker might see (can check your own IP with "ip:xxx.xxx.xxx.xx".

Try entering something like Synology, Proxmox, Truenas, Unraid, Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, or any of the other popular home services.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that my services are only accessible through a VPN. Otherwise, I completely agree with you.

> which you won't know unless you check

RSS feeds FTW

It's pretty easy to soft expose yourself too now with things like cloudflare tunnels without a lot of the security risks. You can put all access behind an secret/API key or OAuth login easily.

I definitely need to get my security hygiene up to snuff, but let me ask you, since using a reverse proxy (caddy in my case) refuses connections without a domain, would the scans reveal anything about my host if they don’t know the URL of my jellyfin instance?

> As a bare minimum, you should update your server and docker images daily, or at least whenever there's an update (which you won't know unless you check).

I got this setup automatically with Renovate: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/blob/main/src/cdk8...

Who maintains the VPN?

If it were me doing this, either Zerotier or Tailscale. They aren't strictly VPN's in a traditional sense, but they largely achieve the same ends, and Zerotier's been much more flexible and performant than anything else I've ever tried.

But on a homelab you can host any service you want and start/stop it whenever you need to. Sure cloud storage might cost less in the short-term, but if you need more storage or more services, a selfhosted option is far cheaper.

VPS are very expensive for what you get. If you have the capital, doing it yourself saves you money very quickly. It's not rare to pay $50 for a semi-decent VPS, but for $2000 you would get an absolute beast that would last 10 years at the very least.

With Docker, maintenance is basically zero and unused services are stopped or restarted with 1 command.

How many services do you need ? And how much CPU power do those services need ?

I've also self hosted for decades, but it turns out i don't really need that much, at least not public.

I basically just need mail, calendar, file storage and DNS adblocking. I can get mail/calendar/file storage with pretty much any cloud provider (and no, there is no privacy when it comes to mail, there is always another participant in the conversation), and for €18/year i can get something like NextDNS, Control D, or similar.

For reference, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 will use around 50 kWh per year, which (again in europe) will translate to €15/year. For just €3 more per year i get redundancy and support.

I still run a bunch of stuff at home, but nothing is opened to the public internet. Everything runs behind a Wireguard VPN, and i have zero redundant storage. My home storage is used for backing up cloud storage, as well as storing media and client backups. And yes, i also have another cloud where i backup to.

My total cloud bill is around €20-€25/month, with 8TB of storage, ad blocking DNS, mail/calendar/office apps and even a small VPS.

I did not do the price calculations (in France, and I prefer not to know :) but I host many things except for mail and calendar (mail is tricky to host). Of these 29 services, I use maybe 4 daily and 15 monthly. They are well protected, easy to maintain, and serve family and friends.

Not to mention that I love them.

The others' points are valid. Google Drive is rather expensive, Hetzner is cheaper and works well enough.

However, it also depends on how you use that data. In my case, I'm a Sunday photographer, so I tend to wrangle multiple GB of data at a time. I usually edit my photos locally, but I sometimes will want to revisit older stuff. I can download it, but it's a PITA and s_l_o_w. Google drive file stream is terrible for this, you never know if the files are uplaoded or not. Onedrive isn't any better. I haven't tried dropbox.

Hetzner has some storage box which exposes SMB but doesn't seem to enforce encryption nor IP filtering, so I'm not very comfortable with that.

Also, my internet connection pretends I have 5 Gb down, 0.5 up. The down part is usually as expected (my machine only has a 1 Gb nic), but upload is sometimes very slow. Running a local NAS is much faster. It's ZFS, so backups are trivial to send to encrypted offsite storage.

It also doesn't need to run 24/7, which helps with power usage (0.22 €/kWh here).

> I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is finite, you can always make more money.

Indeed. Waiting around for files to transfer gets old quick. I have better things to do with my time. My NAS needs a whopping five minutes of my time every now and again when a new kernel comes out.

Once you know how to build and maintain infrastructure you realize that while it's nice to know how to do it, it's not cost-effective.

The thing is, it's worth it to learn. Do you know the basics of how to set up a completely redundant environment? There's no conceptual difference between setting one up at home by using consumer equipment and setting it up in a data center. You can get pretty capable equipment (Mikrotik) for less. The enterprise stuff has more configuration options, but it's doubtful that you'll use most of them.

Set up backup WANs, redundant routing, DNS, power, etc is fun. Setting up redundant load balancers, backend services, databases, etc is also fun. It's not hard to do, it's just hard to get it all right. There are probably a zillion configuration parameters you can mess with, and only a few sets actually work. Unfortunately, the sets that work in your home won't be the ones that will work in production, but you could possibly run load tests etc to simulate a real environment (though simulating multiple clients from multiple endpoints is harder than you think).

And of course, getting production equipment is hard. Nobody has 2 F5s lying around. And you really need at least 4 F5s, because you have redundant locations. That's a lot of cashola. And in most environments you wouldn't want some random person messing around with the production (or test) F5s. It's the same with NAS, VM servers, docker registries, etc.

I suspect getting the whole end-to-end setup isn't something people experience anymore, because small companies have (or at least should have) moved to the cloud by now.

Not everything that seems "interesting" is worth it to learn from an economic perspective. Could it be worthwhile for someone studying for the A+ Computer Technician test? Maybe. Could it be worth it for someone looking to impress their boss Harry? Possibly, if Harry also controls your pay and has a penchant for overpaying for locally run infrastructure and a distrust of the cloud. Possibly. These kinds of investments are based evaluated at the individual level --- not everyone will benefit. Some may find themselves no more competitive in the job market as your average IT clown, but as always, results will vary.

Learning things because they are interesting is reason enough in itself for many people, regardless of any economic benefit.

Google Premium storage, is $100/yr (paid annually) for 2TB of storage.

Even at the high end estimate the homelab is giving you several times the storage for the same cost.

do you need more space than 2TB ? (excluding things you've downloaded from the internet)

Very few people i know has use for that much storage. Yes, you can download the entire netflix catalog, and that will of course require more storage, and no, you probably shouldn't put it in the cloud (or even back it up, or use redundant storage for it).

Setting up your own homelab to be your own netflix, but using pirated content, is not really a use case i would consider. I'm aware people are doing it, and i still think it's stupid. They're saving money by "stealing" (or at least breaking laws), which is hardly a lifehack.

I know many people that would fill that space with home videos from phones and digital cameras. Millennials with kids especially.

You can fit A LOT of photos and videos in 2TB.

My wife is a professional photographer, and while we do archive most of her RAW files somewhere else, pretty much everything HEIC, JPEG or any other compressed format lives in our main cloud.

We have 2.2TB in total for “direct storage”, and we’re currently using around 1.5TB, and that’s including myself and our kids.

My personal photo library has just short of 90,000 photos, and about 5,000 videos. My wife’s library is roughly twice that. I have no idea how many photos the kids have, but they each take up around 200GB for photos.

And then we have backups, which actually take up about 1TB per person, mostly because that’s the space I’ve allocated for each, so history just grows until it’s filled. Photos ideally won’t change much. We backup originals along with XMP metadata for edits, so the photos stays the same, and changes are described in easily compressed text files. Backups of course also have deduplication enabled.

My mother, now in her 70s, has about 4tb worth of photos and videos, and we haven't even started digitizing stuff.

My friend, in her mid 20s, uses nearly 3tb of apple cloud space with photos and videos, mostly of her kids and dog.

I dont even film much but im using about a terabyte.

You are moving the goalposts and supporting your generic point only under very narrow assumed conditions.

There’s always a “right tool for the job”. Sometimes it’s the cloud. Sometimes it isn’t. The article is for people who found the cloud isn’t a good fit and need something at home.

A lot of people have large collections of music or movies. Or want to keep full control over some data no matter the cost. Or need it to work without internet. There are many solid reasons to avoid the cloud and use your own solution.

You are arguing that your original assertion isn’t wrong, people’s stated needs must be wrong. Because you have different needs so others must be doing it wrong. And this undermines everything else you say.

Five comments up you're talking about 4x4TB NAS setups. Which is it?

> do you need more space than 2TB ?

Yes.

> (excluding things you've downloaded from the internet)

Why on earth would I do that? My storage includes things I downloaded from the internet that are not there anymore/hard to find/now paywalled. If you were thinking the only thing to download from the internet is pirated media - I haven't included that in my >2TB assessment.

Author here, I completely agree. In fact, I even wrote about it: https://ergaster.org/posts/2023/08/09-i-dont-want-to-host-se...

My homelab is my hobby. I maintain it for my pleasure and to learn new skills. We have an infra nerds club with a few colleagues and we're having a lot of fun comparing our approaches!

As a Northern European (Finland) I can tell you that the electricity cost here for last year was closer to 0,1 € per kWh including the transfer fee and taxes. Additionally, more than 40 % of houses here have electric heating. The heating season starts in early autumn and ends in late spring, lasting 8 to 9 months depending on the year. As the electricity used by the device is turned into heat, during the heating season running it costs nothing.

Yeah, northern scandinavia has plenty of renewable energy.

As for electric heating, that is true in 1:1 heating scenarios, but i assume you guys are also using heat pumps these days, and while you still get heat "for free", it will not be anywhere as efficient as your heat pump.

Yes, it's probably peanuts in the grand scheme of things, i know our air to water heat pump in Denmark uses around 4500-5500 kWh per year, so adding another 100 kWh probably won't mean much.

a NAS has like 10000x more storage than google drive and is also way faster locally.

The premium plan from Google has 2 TB and costs about the same annually as the electricity for the NAS that the GP comment suggested for comparison (at 100% usage). So at the same ONGOING cost (not even counting initial investment), the NAS has 8 times more storage. 16 times if you assume it will be mostly idle. Except if you want high availability with RAID, then you're back to 8 times. And haven't yet thought about backups.

All this assuming that you even need that much storage, which most people definitely do not.

Google cloud has deleted user's data by mistake in the past.

I'm willing to bet that far more data has been lost to people serving their own data, than Google has lost data.

In any case, you should always make backups regardless of where your data is stored. At home, your biggest threat is loss of data, probably through hardware malfunction, house fires or similar.

In the cloud your biggest threat is not loss of data but loss of access to data. Different scenarios but identical outcomes.

Backup solves both scenarios, RAID doesn't solve any of them, but sadly, many people think "oh but I've got RAID6 so surely I cannot lose data".

Having experienced batches of faulty HDDs in a home NAS, you can definitely lose data with RAID6/ZFS-2 even.

Of course, syncing a NAS between yourself and a friend or family member's home may be the better solution over cloud options.

How much space do you realistically need high availability, redundant storage for ?

For my personal use case, that involves photos and documents, all things i cannot easily recreate (photos less so). Those are what matters to me, and storing them in the cloud means i not only get redundancy in a single data center, but also geographical redundancy as many cloud providers will use erasure coding to make your data available across multiple data centers.

Everything else will be just fine on a single drive, even a USB drive, as everything that originated on the internet can most likely be found there again. This is especially true for media (purchased, or naval aquisition). Media is probably the most replicated data on the planet, possibly only behind the bible and IKEA catalog.

So, back to the important data, i can easily fit an entire family of 4 into a single 2TB data plan. That costs me somewhere around €85 - €100 per year, for 4 people, and it works no matter what i do. I no longer need to drag a laptop with me on vacation, and i can basically just say "fuck it" and go on vacation for 2 weeks.

I just need you to make comparisons that are fair.

I thought they were.

If you need to commute to work daily, and you're concerned about the cost, you don't really care if you're comparing a city car vs a sports car vs the bus, despite on goes at 80km/h, and another can do 230km/h, if all you're interested in is the price.

Obviously as your storage needs increase, so will cloud costs, but unless you're a professional photographer, I'm guessing 2TB will be more than enough for most people.

Again, not talking about people trying to run their own media server on pirated content, and saving money that way. In my book that's comparable to saving money by robbing a bank. You're not saving anything, you're breaking the law, and 9 out of 10 times, it's cheaper to steal someone else's bike than it is taking a taxi home.

I'm talking actual storage for data you actually own, and possibly even data you have created yourself. Anything that came from the internet can be found on the internet again, purchased or naval acquisition.

Sorry, you make some good arguments but then mix them up with clueless assertions.

2 TB ought to good for everyone is hilarious. There is so many people I know who would fill 512 GB phone in 1-2 year with photos and videos.

Maybe you do not have use case or situation where larger storage is needed. But it is strange to assume everyone in same bucket.

> everything that originated on the internet can most likely be found there again

I would that this were true. I guess it depends on what you mean by "the internet", but there's a reason the Internet Archive exists. Sure, you don't need to back up your recent Firefox installer or your Debian ISO but lots of important and valuable data can't be found on the internet anymore. There are very valid reasons that groups like Archiveteam [1] do what they do, not to mention recent headlines like individuals losing access to their entire cloud storage [2].

[1] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page [2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/aws_wipes_ten_years/

It’s great to learn on, and if you happen to have a place with free electricity then even more fun :)

It’s also an excuse for me to stay in most summer days.

The price and effort is practically irrelevant. My homelab is mine, local, and answers only to myself and a wall outlet. Also, where I live, the internet is simply not dependable enough to consider otherwise.

OP has admittedly over-engineered their setup. Depending on your goals (cost, speed, space, autonomy), there are less-rigorous solutions for the layperson.

I, for one, don't want to have Google, etc. as a dependency[1], so I will pay some energy cost to do that.

1: see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

>Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you

Who are you to tell people how to spend their time? Let people have hobbies ffs

A server will never love you back.

Neither will the majority of hobbies for self-enrichment.

It isn’t unreasonable to want some alone time.

Well I'm ugly so… at least it doesn't actively hate me either.

Yeah, also neither it wants to move out because you pushed start button too many times or stay sullen over weekend because dinner plan on Friday got canceled.

Neither will a lizard. People still have them.

It's purpose in life is to serve not to love.

Unless you run your AI waifu on it.

Stop with this infantilising crap. People can have both rewarding relationships and pastimes. Just because someone likes configuring software does not suggest they neglect their relationships or have delusions that need correction about the value of things in their life.

Sure, run a homelab as a hobby. Everybody has hobbies.

Once your user count goes beyond 1, you suddenly have a SLA as people are dependent on your services. Like it or not, you are now the primary support staff of your local cloud business.

The more users you get, the more time you will need to spend to fix problems.

At which point does it go from a hobby to a 2nd job ?

You're still arguing from the point of view of someone who doesn't want to do it or isn't interested in doing it. Your GP said you 'get' homelabs but it's increasingly clear you do not - and that's ok. People run homelabs because they enjoy learning and tinkering. If they don't enjoy it, or they can't risk having the odd problem, they have other options they can explore. It's not really any more complicated than that. Believe it or not, people are capable of evaluating the tradeoffs and making a sensible decision about what to host themselves.

Its a hobby for devs that work at such a high level of abstraction that they need to tinker with servers to remind them they still exist.

Every homelab I have come across is a hobby project and time sink that is more like a backyard garden or classic car.

Encrypted data on the servers is only useful if your server is just dumb storage. I want the server to actually do something, e.g. serving media, running home assistant etc.

> Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you.

Agreed, but it doesn't have to take time from your family. I'm on a small team that self-hosts internal services to lower costs/risks. It takes very little time to maintain, and maintenance windows happen on our terms. Our uptime this year is better than "Github Actions", the latency is incredible, and we've had no known security issues.

There are two keys to doing this successfully: (1) don't deploy anything you don't understand (so it won't take you long to fix), and (2) even then, aggressively avoid complexity (so it doesn't break in the first place.)

For example, despite significant network expertise, we stuck to a basic COTS router and a simple IPv4 subnet for our servers. And the services we run are typically self-contained golang binaries that we can deploy with bash onto baremetal. No docker, kvm, ansible, or k8s.

This DIY setup saves us considerably more than it costs. Not for everyone, but with proper scoping, many readers of hacker news could pull this off without losing time with their loved ones.

> Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you.

To some, spending time hunched over servers is doing things they love.

I mean, each and every thing you said about maintaining a home lab you can also say about maintaining cloud infrastructure.

There was a time when having hobbies was normal. It seems nowadays some people mistake hobbies for work after hours? Where is that hacker mindset?

lol.

don't spend your time cooking food, pay for others to prepare it for you.

don't spend your time maintainig a house, rent and let someone else do the maintenance.

just lease a car and get a new one automatically every 3 years.

honestly, everyone has their own setpoint for things. and there are degrees of solutions for every point you make.

I think most people would benefit from being just a little bit self-sovereign.

Personally, "majority of people" could use one low power fanless server with 1tb for the few things most people need continuously online.

And separately a server you turn on occasionally with lots of storage, like maybe

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TV1XPDD

I'm reminded of jwz's backups info www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

"RAID is a goddamn waste of your time and money"

Seems like a lot of adults yearn for having a mommy and daddy take care of everything for them

Alternately, most computer vendors actively interfere with your independence and force you into the cloud in various ways with your computers and phones.