Around the beginning of this year I decided to build myself a new server for my home use. This would be the third iteration of a home server. But it’s been a long road, getting from there to here.

Gen 1

Gen 1 was a rather cheap dell poweredge that I got back in 2016 or so, it had only two intended purposes, running owncloud for easy picture backups from my phone and serve as a network drive, so I could put my files on it. I quickly added a Windows Virtual Machine (VM) so I could remotely connect home, which became my main machine. What followed was a second VM for a proper firewall (Sophos at that point).

4 years later owncloud had been switched for nextcloud and it was also running some home automation stuff, first iobroker later homeassitant. It was briefly used as a Windows Server as well, during my “Microsoft is great” phase (don’t judge me, I was young, I experimented and learned from my mistakes).

All that time, I ran every service in a single VM, as you can guess a cheap tower server with a 4 core CPU quickly ran into trouble handling the load. Over the years I upgraded the storage and the RAM but ultimately the CPU was the bottleneck.

In 2020 I moved from my flat to the house I am now living in and the house came with a server rack in the cellar. I gave a hosting provider I knew a call to let me know if they had any old servers they wanted to get rid off and as luck had it, he could offer me two identical ones.

Gen 2

These would become the second iteration, which was great, given that I was living in my flat while renovating the house, so I could access the stuff at the house remotely, while Gen 1 still served as the main server.

However I very much fucked up the planning here. Yes, they were cheap, cost me 80€ each, yes, they were powerful, 32GB of Ram, 4 TB of storage and dual 6 core CPUs as well as redundant power supplies.

What I did was put them both in the rack, one was the primary server the other the backup, rsync copied everything every hour, so that in case number one died, number two could simple pick up and go.

A really proper setup.

But here is where I fucked up. The rack is located in the room that became my fitness room and those two servers, well, a Boing 747 makes less noise than these taking off.

So they had to go, but I had added so many services that moving back to Gen 1 was not really an option.

Until I discovered the magic of containerisation.

Gen 1.5

Realising that using containers for my self hosted services had way less overhead than setting up a VM for each made it feasible to move back to the old server, that was quieter and also used a lot less energy. I clocked the old one at around 80W of permanent draw, while the Gen 2 ones pulled 200W each…

After everything was moved I turned off the two Gen 2 servers, stacked them in the attic, had Gen 1.5 running silently in my fitness room and was a happy sailor.

Even updates took less time, instead of updating every VM and every service on the VMs manually every Saturday, I now had an automated script, that just updated the containers.

All in all Gen 1.5 while being a downgrade from Gen 2 actually was a huge improvement.

But it was an old machine, one day I woke up and the server mailed me a S.M.A.R.T status warning, meaning that one of the hard drives in there was about to die. I switched it for a new one, 2 months later the next one went. Taking a closer look at the machine I found that Dell hat come up with a strange power supply that couldn’t be switched for a standard one either and concluded, that this cheap little server, that served so well, was ready for retirement.

I wasn’t willing to spend a lot of money on a new one and remembered I had the two loud ones in the attic.

Gen 2.what-was-that

What I did next, was deciding to move the rack from my fitness room over to my workshop room. The reason I didn’t do that in the first place was, that there was neither power in there except the light nor was there any networking available.

So I pulled in power wires and four cat7 network cables, got a new rack-switch and installed the two Gen 2 servers.

The obvious first task was to transfer all my files, pictures and everything else from the current server over to the “new” ones and set up mirroring between them again.

The plan was, to get everything working, test for a couple of weeks if there were any issues and if not, do a final backup from old to new and shut down the old machine.

And that plan was a wise one. Turns out the power supply in the old Dell wasn’t the one to worry about, as one of the redundant ones in the two Gen 2 ones blew, making the other one shrieking through the house like fire siren.

I shut both of them down, started searching for a replacement part and given that all power supplies had run the same time, I was looking for four.

I didn’t find many offerings and the cheapest set of these would come was about 1200€ and those were used ones too.

Obviously spending 1.2k to save 160€ worth of servers was out of the question.

Which takes me to

Gen 3

I decided to build one myself this time, using standard components, so that I could get an easy replacement should something fail. I also got a case that exceeded my current needs, so I could upgrade later on. If you are interested in more details, here is a link to a detailed post: https://www.thewkblog.com/2024/03/22/the-new-home-server/

Anyway, Gen 3 is now in service for about a year and is running smoothly. I now also have a cheap NAS that serves as a daily backup location in case of failure.
I have adjusted updates and offline backups so I have only about 40 Minutes a month of work to perform myself.

So why am I writing about this?

I am going to be hosting my on services for a decade soon and was inspired to sum up the cost of what I was doing here by this post: https://kevquirk.com/blog/the-cost-of-self-hosting

First up, the hardware, I don’t have all the invoices, don’t judge me, but that should come up to are
1.500€, so let say 150€ per year

Then there is energy. For the better part of this journey energy was cheap in Austria, around 0,05€/kWh and the first device wasn’t to hungry, the hungry ones didn’t last long.

Let’s estimate it, 9 years running, that was about 35€ per year until 2022 hit. I also have a solar system installed, so I am not really buying energy all the time, but lets just got with it and say that is our price per year, so in 9 years I spent 315€ on energy.

Add another 100€ or so for a domain.

Add another 100€ for a lifetime license of OnlyOffice documentserver.

I won’t count having internet, because that is sort of a given.

So I spent about 2.015€ on self hosting in 10 years. (Not counting the hours put in)

But is it worth it?

I mean, lets round it, I spent about 200€ each year on having a self hosted cloud service.

That includes a full office package, cloud storage, financial tracker, a private home automation system, webmail, image storage for the entire family (think google photos or iCloud) and all of that done by a person I trust.

So what about the competition?

Let’s break it down, shall we?

Microsoft Office + 1 TB of cloud runs around 100€ per year, I am not paying that

Having my own domain with Microsoft, Google or Apple (do they do that?) would add a bit of a premium to that, let’s tick with Microsoft, that would be 11,50 before taxes per person, if I want to have desktop apps of office, which my family does want. I am not a company, so 20% of taxes for the state added to that, there are four people in my family currently using my system, so I am calculating around 662,4 per year.
I am not paying that.

And hey, who could have guessed, Google asks the same amount and we would only get 5TB of storage compared to the 8 I currently have.

Then there is home automation. Now most solutions cost no money and if you have cameras like me only little money, let’s go with Apples HomeKit Secure Video, that does 5 Cams, I have 5 as it happens.
What you need here is iCloud+ with 200GB of storage, that is around 3€ a month, so 36€ a year. I am not paying that.

Financial tracker: There are many out that that won’t cost you a penny and plenty that won’t cost much and still are very sophisticated pieces of software. Just come to your own conclusions here.

So let us sum up the cost of going with the mainstream for me and my family and the cost of me self-hosting stuff:

Mainstream (Office for all not just me): about 700€ a year, over 10 years, 7k€

Me self hosting: about 200€ a year, over 10 years, 2k€

I know, this is a written blog, but please allow me to do a mic-drop here.

Also a merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of you!