I’m fully onboard with the recent push towards self-hosting services and apps, whether to reduce subscription costs, retain data sovereignty, or pick up some new handy skills. My home lab has NAS units, mini PCs, and is about to get a Mac Studio and a powerful Threadripper workstation, all running different tasks. Some of these services came with additional setup that was mostly glossed over by the initial tutorials, but that’s far from the only thing that isn’t apparent when you take those first few steps into self-hosting.
That’s mainly because everything has a cost associated with it. You might not notice, as your brain is thinking of the money you will save monthly by not paying for cloud subscriptions, but those costs are still there. They could be in time, hardware costs, backup costs, or more intangible costs like the amount of brain energy you have to handle tasks, but they exist, and I’ve found out the hard way that sometimes they’re not much different from cloud subscriptions.
Transferred costs
Hardware, software, and the big one — electricity
I might be one of the few home labbers who doesn’t have a room full of cheap old enterprise parts, but that’s not for lack of trying. It always seemed that those decommissioned rackmount servers disappeared before I messaged, or the rack went to someone else, or any number of other reasons that it never panned out. The only things I have are a few dual SFP+ Mellanox 10GbE/25GbE NICs, which I grabbed off eBay.
Maybe that’s a good thing, because while my electricity costs are around $0.13 per kWh, the additional costs of supply, etc. brings that closer to $0.45 per kWh. If a 15W mini PC can host the services that I need, using a large rackmount server seems superfluous and wasteful.
Most of my hard drives and SSDs are similarly new, because while I know used drives can be just as reliable, they don’t come with the same level of warranty support, and I’m wary of anything without aftersales support because things go wrong, frequently.
Open source and self-hostable doesn’t always mean that the software is free, whether that’s a subscription to remove nag screens and get access to the latest updates like with Proxmox, or more stable packages and customer support in the case of OPNsense. Buying DVDs to encode for your Jellyfin or Plex server has a cost, as does the DVD drive, because what computer comes with one of those nowadays?
Don’t forget domain registration and other networking services
Self-hosting is easier when your services are linked to a domain, and while you can use local domains, having a public domain is always a good idea. Even if you’re cybersquatting on your own name, paying the yearly domain registration means nobody else can impersonate you, and you get a domain name to use for reverse proxies or for using subdomains to make sense of your Docker stack.
And I’ll always recommend having a cheap VPS with several services running on it, because self-hosting doesn’t have to mean everything is under your roof. In fact, some services like remote access or VPNs are better when hosted off-site, as you can sidestep issues with your ISP or access services without needing to keep ports open through your home firewall.
And every Watt you cool needs removing from your office air
My NAS has plenty of storage space and is fairly efficient, even if it’s a quad-core Xeon. But I recently transferred all active data to an all-flash mini PC because it has a CPU with a TDP of 15W at the most, and even with 5W (max) for each of the six NVMe drives, that’s less than the CPU of the older NAS unit uses.
All summer I’ve been suffering somewhat because the devices I self-host are all in my office, and every Watt of power that they consume is partly radiated into my room in heated air. Every bit of heated air means my air conditioning needs to work that little bit harder, and when it can’t keep up, I suffer. The eventual goal is to move most of the equipment either into the network cabinet under the stairs or into the garage, where they can offload heat without it getting to my working area, but some devices I still need easy access for and those are staying in the office.
I haven’t tallied up the exact costs, but I’m pretty confident that for every cent I spend on server electricity, I’m spending nearly a cent on cooling costs. Every piece of equipment I can make more efficient or swap for lower-power units is a blessing for my self-hosted empire.
More hidden costs
After a night of wrestling containers, sanity starts to become one as well
I’m not quite done with practical considerations yet, because if you want to rival the cloud subscriptions you were replacing, you need to think about uptime. That’s a multi-faceted thing of its own, with tools like Keepalived to handle failover between multiple copies of running services, Proxmox clusters to ensure uptime, an uninterruptible power supply in case of blackouts, and a seemingly never-ending list of additions.
Depending on where you are in the world, you might run into issues with your ISP plan. My ISP both blocks some ports necessary for self-hosting, and has CGNAT for even more fun when trying to reach my network from outside. I could pay for a business connection, but that’s over twice the price of what I pay now, and the benefits are few. I’m thankful I don’t have bandwidth or data caps, because that would be even worse but that’s a situation many find themselves in.
And then there are invisible costs. Your mental well-being is often overlooked because things start out fine, as a hobby, but it often soon balloons into an unpaid network admin job on top of your normal job and your family responsibilities. Thoughts like “this will only take a minute” soon turns into eight hours of troubleshooting only to find that the fix was something fairly small.
Add backup costs to your considerations
Keeping up with the not-inconsiderable data needs of self-hosting soon gets expensive. You’ve got local storage that needs maintaining, increasing, and replacing when drives die. Then an equal amount of storage somewhere else, as a mirrored backup for the onsite, and a third, equal amount of data on another physical set of drives.
It all adds up, and if it wasn’t for wanting privacy and your data being in your own hands, it might even be cheaper and easier to use the cloud subscriptions you were trying to get away from. Oh, and one of your backups should be offsite, which could be the cloud, but at least Backblaze or Mega or Amazon Glacier are cheaper than active cloud storage.
Sometimes it’s more cost-effective to stick with the cloud
Don’t get me wrong, I love self-hosting and it’s been an incredibly rewarding journey of self-expression, knowledge gathering, and self-reliance. But I can’t say it’s been considerably cheaper than using cloud services, not when I factor in every other thing. But the increase in privacy and the knowledge that I can, is worth every cent.