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Home Server Or VPS? One Family's Math
toygeek writes "Which is cheaper: Running a server from home, or renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server)? We're trying to pinch pennies where we can, and my son Derrick suggested upgrading an extra PC we have and running his Minecraft server at home. Would it save enough money to be worth it? I wanted to share the results of my analysis with my Slashdot brethren." The upshot in this case? "Overall it is VERY cost effective for us to run the home server."
The problem with his analysis is that he assumes the hardware is free. Also, not many people pay a marginal rate of $0.066/kW-hr for electricity.
The word doesn’t even appear in the article... yet it’s probably the biggest consideration when looking at a server, be it local, shared/vps, or dedicated.
Hardware and even power are cheap by comparison. It’s definitely gonna be the limiting factor of what you can do with a home server (especially a decently sized minecraft server or one that uses a lot of mods..). If you can get a home fibre connection you might be ok, but reading the article, this guy is probably on dialup.. so good luck with that!
Sure, you can replace a PS or HD for less than the annual savings, but what if something bigger than that goes out? You are also ignoring the value of your time, as you would put a fair bit of time in to recovering from either of those losses.
That said, I run my own home server, but it's not something I do to save money. I run my own server because it allows me to configure it exactly how I want it configured and I know exactly how it is managed.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Might I suggest Amazon Web Services? You can get a micro instance for free for a year, and I can't imagine a minecraft server needing a whole lot of resources.
I think you can get a better deal.
http://www.lowendbox.com/
For eg, I have a box from stormvz.com/vps.html and I get a box comparable with the one in the article for £4.25/month.
The costs calculated are likely flawed, as is the performance. First off, the majority of ISP's forbid running any type of server (with a world facing connection) on a residential package service.
Secondly, as one who used to run a Tekkit server for some friends on a co-located (i5-3550k/8GB RAM) Ubuntu server, Minecraft requires good upstream speed to host more than 3-4 connections. Even at 10Mbps upstream, having more than 5 people on started to lag everyone slightly.. the more users of course, the worse it got.
It's one thing to run a intranet for XMBC, but whole different ballgame once you start have a world facing server.
Not included the cost of the computer.
Or the maintenance cost (parts and labor).
Or connectivity cost.
Or excess traffic costs (ISP love charging those when they can)
These days, I don't even use VPN anymore. I only use self-managed dedicated servers. Ok, they are not gaming servers for my kid, but still one of them is just sitting there for me to play with.
The savings you get from "doing things yourself" can be very deceptive.
morcego
Maybe I should be telling you to get off my lawn, but I think of servers more in terms of ftpd or httpd.
Because I don't think this article made anyone wiser. I mean, doing a couple of multiplications and divisions is not a big deal.
Do you really want all that traffic coming directly to you? The author points out home IPs can chance. Why get rid of the VPS storage and RAM and get one with cheap or unlimited bandwidth, then use a VPN to make your home server appear as if it is directly connected to the internet? This fixes the IP changing problem and does not give away your home address.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
add in file sharing and the slower response of a VPS solution just takes it completely out of the running.
I actually had this exact question myself. For 1 year I owned a fairly decent and cheap VPS, it worked great and did everything I wanted and more. It was a great buy and I think in the end cost me something like $20 a month. I'm current running that same server at home on an old Core 2 Quad machine, The bandwidth in both cases is rather low so in the end it was cheaper for me to run the server from my bed room. However that being said, well you may get a cheaper solution you have to do a lot more work to get the same features, a VPS will come loaded with lots of great management tools and third party plugins which are very nice to have.
In the end I would say run your own server, as long as you have a good amount of extra bandwidth a month in the order of a few GB's. If you want features and ease of administration then buy a VPS. It's a thin line and both sides have a lot going from them.
If it is only for minecraft? If so, and you are trying to pinch pennies, have the kid stop playing minecraft and get a job.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
If you have a closet for your networking equipment, and you have an older desktop PC that's fairly efficient, and you're going to be buying bandwidth already, having a server of your own is a really good idea.
In addition, it can be a useful way to learn Linux and/or Windows Server admin skills.
However, this assumes you have all of the above, and the time to maintain the thing. Who fixes it if it dies? Now everyone relies on it. Who will make sure it is going to stay up for them?
If you work a guaranteed eight hours a day and no more, you might be able to fix it up when you get home or on the weekends. Sometimes however that's not an option.
Thus while the server is cheaper, the time to administrate it may not be.
I am very interested in some guy's analysis of his son's minecraft server and his almost $300 annual cost savings! Can we talk about coupon strategies now and whether a Costco membership is worth it?
I was thinking of doing something similar - but mainly to give my kids some experience. The biggest issue for me is security. Is it wise to start opening up a home network to the outside world? Where can I look to find out more about this?
I rent several Xen-based 512mb Linux virtual servers to run some club websites, and a mail server. They cost me a total of $28.50 semi-annually each (or $5/mo monthly). They include 20GB of disk space, and a 1TB/month transfer. I also have an older Dell 1U server which I'm gonna be retiring soon, as it's sucking my electric bill down to ruin. I'm planning to sign up for another VPS and migrate the functions on the Dell box over. Of course, you have to weigh the cost of bandwidth to/from this VPS, ie: if you're on an ISP who cheats you with a absurdly low monthly cap. If you're not a big Linux fan, they also have Xen-based Windows offerings at slightly higher prices.. In case you're interested, google "virpus networks"... I don't own em, work for em, have stock in em, just a happy customer...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Around here we pay 14 cents per kWH for electricity. A server draws about 800W so 800 * 24 = 19.2kWh per day. Times 30 days it's 576kWh which comes out to $80.64 per month just for electricity.
VPS can be had for $7 to $20 per month.
Most of the VPS servers I've seen have some manner of backup included in the price. I didn't see any cost included in the home server for backups. Or a UPS, for that matter.
The comparison isn't quite valid. You are looking at short term costs, but you neglect the long term costs. A business will factor in things like what it will cost to replace the VPS every 3 years. If your system isn't up to snuff in a year or two, have you put enough aside to replace it? Lets say a new system will cost you $450. That means you need to add $150 per year to factor that in. As some others have said, you ignore the network costs. There is a cost (maybe to you it is intangible) for using your home network. You can say it doesn't cost, but the cost is not $0. Maybe 10% is a better number. Anyways, these are the kinds of things that commercial companies grapple with in the pricing models.
Overrated, Troll, and Flamebait mod points are not to be used towards posts you disagree with. That IS censorship.
Minecraft servers are crazy resource intensive, even with just 5-6 people logged in. The crappy single threaded program sometimes hiccups on my Xeon E5430, really wants about 1GB RAM to itself, and that's with no mods loaded and less than 10 people playing with medium visibility.
Frankly, your Athlon 4200+ probably isn't going to cut it, and you can't even upgrade it to something that will. There is no 939/AM2 CPU that will keep a minecraft server happy, and once you start looking at VPS which allow large amounts of RAM and CPU usage you might be looking at more than $325/yearly.
You should really be comparing the cost of a cheap new build vs. decent hosting, cause you are already looking at replacing motherboard, CPU, and memory for something fast enough to run a server for even 5 people, unless you want them all to be blinded by super short vision distance.
You are also ignoring the value of your time, as you would put a fair bit of time in to recovering from either of those losses.
How does one value one's time, anyways? From reading the article it seems the poster's son is interested in stuff like this and likes running a Minecraft - server, so it would be a hobby for him and therefore any time spent on recovering from losses would still be within the limits of an educational hobby. Other people could use that time for e.g. watching the TV, but is that really any more a valuable way of spending one's time?
OK. Minecraft needs 2GB RAM to run. A VPS will cost you £150 a year flat rate for that with unlimited bandwidth (not that you'd need it).
No brainer. Home server = electricity bills, hardware failures, maintenance, blah, blah, blah...
The comparison assumes that you already have a server on hand. An accurate comparison would be if you were starting from scratch with nothing on hand. Then you'd factor in the cost of the entire server (not just the pidly little 25 dollar upgrade). Also, the comparison assumes you only need one IP address. With a VPS, you typically can get extra IP addresses for no additional charge. I don't think Comcast or AT&T is going to give me any free extra IP's, or even sell you any for that matter. And lets not forget that servers need maintenance. Drives gotta get replaced probably at least once a year if you have any real kind of traffic on your site. Your VPS provider isn't going to slap hardware costs on top of your monthly bill.
This seems an awful lot of money to host a minecraft server, and this needs to be on 24/7?
I see giving your gaming computer a hardware boost as a better use of your money rather than running minecraftd on a standalone machine
http://www.awfullybigmoustache.com
I'll agree with you on everything else, but hardware doesn't cost anything, and hasn't for a couple decades. At least not in my world.
I just stop by any corporate office park or hospital on the way home from work and pull a few machines out of their dumpsters. A PC with a fried HD that was state of the art two years ago, a SATA disk array with a burnt mobo and a half dozen good terabyte drives in it, frankenloaded into an old tower chassis... boot up your favorite linux distro and you've got a server that lasts 5 to 15 years (in my experience). Cost: a few hours time.
With a proper hosting company you should have better hardware redundancy than you would get with a home setup. More than one network link, for example, and redundant switching hardware. You'd also have staff monitoring network status and responding to DOS attacks. I'm not sure how you'd handle a DOS against a home server. Another thing is security - if you've got your tax returns and other personal documents accessible on your home network - the same one the minecraft server is running on - you may be putting those at risk to a security breach. So yeah, it's cheaper to run at home, but you're not getting all the extras that a VPS has, either. That said, starting with a server at home is a good test to see if you want to trade up to a more expensive, hosted setup later on (when you have a user base and cash donations start coming in).
We have a blog post about how much electricity it costs to run a server at home and comparing-apples-to-oranges (nothing considered - or mostly just neatly glossed over - in terms of maintenance, uptime, hardware expense, noise, upstream connectivity, etc.). And for a games server (so the most vital of all possible servers).
This is yet-another mark against the name of "news for nerds". A two-second calculation that any of us could make (and probably have a hundred times) with a $5 watt meter and an electricity bill, posing as an "article" for "nerds".
I run a VPS. You know why? Because I can get it to do everything I do on my Linux servers at home, but it's sitting in a datacentre with ridiculous amounts of bandwidth available to it (I think I get 5Tb of traffic before anyone even asks questions, and upload/download at stupid speeds all day long) and is managed by someone else - starting at £10 a month, I've gone up to £30 a month for more RAM, more data allowance, and proper backups.
I run dedicated servers for work - same reasons. Of course we could do it in-house, that's not the point. The point is that you only pay for an external server if you need external connectivity or management, and that's a question that doesn't have a "opinion" answer, so much as a binary yes/no answer about whether you should do it or not. You don't run email servers from your home ADSL and you don't download gigabytes of movies or whatever to your VPS only to then have to trickle-feed them back to your home PC anyway.
And for most things you need, the cheapest of cheap VPS's with a decent host will be able to do everything you want. If you want to do specialist gaming servers, look at gaming server hosts. They are stupidly cheap. If you want to do high-bandwidth video streaming, look at proper dedicated servers with proper connectivity. If you want to let your kids play Minecraft together on a secure "internal" server, slap a VM on an old desktop in your spare room and have done with it.
It's not a question. You either need an external managed host and the benefits of that, or you don't. Now if you were talking about a business with SLA-guaranteed leased lines and lots of bandwidth to spare, asking the same question (in-house vs external), it's closer to an opinion piece where getting some stats can help and even then there's no "right answer" that will cover everyone so much as a summing up of individual circumstances. But you're not.
If you want a VPS to run your website, email, spam filtering, act as an external VPN, secure your SVN repositories, proxy downloads for you, and a million and one other jobs? Buy it, find out. If you're at the point of running servers, £10 a month is low enough to test it out (and the place I'm with offer a £1 trial month) and see if it helps you.
But this "article"? You recovered yourself a few months ago after the crap videos and junk you foisted on us until your returned to normal - this is just another step down on the graph, as far as I'm concerned, and it's getting close to crossing the x-axis again.
If your pinching pennies why don't you kick the kid off the games and make him get a job. If he is too young to get a job then find a coal mine and tell him it is real life minecraft, v0.5.
I hope this guy is not anyone's CPA or handles and sort of financial analysis/projections at his work.
The most likely indication that he is in financial management, is you figure out the aggregate total sum of his, PLUS all involved /.ers hourly rate, and the cost of debating this probably has at least 3 or 4 more zeros than the expense involved. Penny wise and pound foolish and all that.
Everyone at work has had the experience of a two hour meeting with 15 devs at $100/hr to debate exactly how in painful detail the group will pay roughly $5/month for coffee, and whoever saves the most pennies (at a mere cost of $3000 labor) will get some kind of BS award on their annual review. Why if we save 30 cents a year, at a cost of $3000 we'll be rollin in the profits by 1st quarter 12013... of course a real NPV calc based on real rates would make it pretty hard to ever profit off an annual return of 30 cents on a 3000 dollar investment...
The only thing the dude needs to do is:
1) Is it possible? Yes, obviously
2) Is its cost in line for a hobby expense? Yes, its cheaper than golf or watching cable TV or pretty much anything other than watching paint dry. Heck, even then you'd have to buy paint and paint ain't cheap.
3) Is it fun? Well, its probably more fun to host at home, than pay an intermediary to do it for you. Much like its a hell of a lot more fun to cook than order delivery.
So yeah .. just do it.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
At least in my local neighborhood, most ISPs frown on running an internet server of any kind out of your house, even Minecraft servers. That is, unless you opt for a business internet account, which adds substantial cost to your internet service over a standard home account. That cost alone will easily eat into the savings you have from running the hardware out of your home instead of a VPS.
Of course, most business internet accounts are also bandwidth unlocked, so there is that.
The VPS you listed on your findings is way overpriced. A basic VPS capable of Minecraft hosting is $7 / month or less. You can find even lower rates on special deals listing sites such as http://www.lowendbox.com/ and http://lowendstock.com/ . You can go as low as $15 / year.
I can say VPS is clearly the biggest ripoff ever presented in hosting. The model revolves around oversubscription on a single server, in the hopes that not everyone on that server is using their resources constantly. in actuality ~80 or so guests constantly fight for resources, with the various resources sliders in the panel controlling the VPS meaning little or nothing at the vserver host level.
VPS is also routinely used in outbound spam runs and DDoS attacks, meaning its notorious for packet loss. Best of all, the next wordpress/drupal/click-me-to-install-blog exploit to hit the streets will, almost guaranteed, turn the vserver into a paperweight as a nontrivial number of guests have the aformentioned app.
on a system level, vserver routinely forgets what localhost is until its rebooted, and nice things like iptables are a bitter memory as they dont exist. My opinion: spend a dollar and upgrade to a dedicated server or just host a home server. its not that expensive and you have the added benefit of learning about servers :)
Good people go to bed earlier.
Port blocking and bandwidth are the most important things. Most IPS block port 25 in and out and port 80 in. I can run a server with less than 1G memory for both email with postfix, spamassassin ang web server nginx. I have monitoring tools also running but they take so little resources that they don't count. The next level of issues are power backup, moving residence, backup storage,... VPS form me is better.
The former issue's severity can be weighed against the fact that if your home power or intenet goes down, you won't be able to use the service from home anyways. Plus, you can mitigate the issue of having to manually reboot the server should the power fail by either configuring the BIOS to do so, or investing in a UPS, which can keep it going for a few additional hours. But finally, and perhaps most significantly, one should also try to keep this in perspective here... this is for running a game, and not something that evidently is supposed to be generating any revenue, so is the necessity for 100% uptime actually worth the cost of renting a VPS?
The issue of home IP numbers changing can be resolved through the use of dynamic DNS, which can map a static host name to a possibly changing IP address. The cost for such services is on the order of no more than a few cents a day (some such services are even free), and I would strongly recommend such a service for somebody who wants to reliably connect to their home computer from outside of their network
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is he even allowed via TOS to put a server on a home connection? How much extra is a dedicated IP? How smart is the ISP lackey that pick up the phone when there is a routing error?
There's the million dollar question... er, questions. I ran a small (5-10 user) forum on a server on my home account for several years, until my ISP figured it out. They cut off my service and wouldn't turn it back on until I promised to quit running a server on their network.
Of course, there's also the matter of the massively crippled upload speed if he's on practically anything other than a fiber connection. How responsive is your home-grown Minecraft server going to be once it's got a few people milling around on it? For that matter, will your Internet connection be useful for anything else at the same time?
honestly if you just want a VPS to run minecraft on, there's plenty of places that'll do it for less than $7/mo.
From reading the article it seems the poster's son is interested in stuff like this and likes running a Minecraft - server, so it would be a hobby for him and therefore any time spent on recovering from losses would still be within the limits of an educational hobby.
Sure, but what is not clear is how much of the poster's time would be consumed by this. Is the son capable of managing this on his own (the abstract suggests the answer may be no)? If the dad has to put time into this then you need to estimate what his time is worth - in particular the opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Other people could use that time for e.g. watching the TV, but is that really any more a valuable way of spending one's time?
Also just because I make "skilled craftsman" type hourly rates (about as much per hour as a plumber) unlike a plumber I can only realistically get precisely 40 hrs per week. Not 39, not 41, but exactly 40 hrs at that rate.
Yes hrs 1 thru 40 I get about plumber income per hour, but as soon as I hit that 41st hour at home, I would have to hunt for a job and in this economy blah blah and with the flexibility required for a second job, and only wanting to work precisely one hour not 20 every week etc, I think I'd be VERY lucky to cashier at quickie mart for $7.25/hr, if that is even possible.
So unless you can actually do it, and you want to, don't assume the cost of a marginal extra hours labor is your regular pay rate. In other words the cost of an hours labor at $job during regular business hours is plumber-ish hourly rate, but at home after hours I cannot realistically earn more than a couple bucks per hour.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
>You are also ignoring the value of your time
Whenever I see that argument put forward, I can't help but think how lame it is since by that logic we should not do anything ourselves. We should not shop for our own food, clean our clothes or home, put gas in the card, or god forbid wash the darn thing.
I agree on hardware costs. The most I've paid for a server is $200 and that's for dual dual-core Xeons, 16GB RAM, 6 SCSI drives on a RAID card, redundant PSUs and all very clean. Most of my stuff was free or dirt cheap off Craigslist. Memory is the only thing that may need to be upgraded on most servers and that can be pretty cheap - especially if you're using desktop hardware.
Sure, you can replace a PS or HD for less than the annual savings, but what if something bigger than that goes out?
What's more expensive in modern computer than hard drives? I regularly get my PC's from thrift stores and throw hard drives in them. In my experience, the hard drives are the most expensive parts. Everything else is negligible.
I don't respond to AC's.
I also have been looking at hosting a Minecraft server recently. I have been hosting a personal server for my friends and I for a while now and wanted to take it public. I was planning on self hosting until the price of bandwidth came up. For a 20-person server, it would cost me $60 more per month than I pay right now. And that's the max I can ever do in my area.
I looked at a hosted solution. No limits on storage space or bandwidth, only limits on amount of memory used. $20 a month. 1/3rd the cost, and room to grow.
But that's where the creepers are.
You are also ignoring the value of your time
There are people out there who can interchange time and money pretty freely. E.G. self employed tradesmen who have more clients wanting work than time to do that work and workers who work at a place that pays overtime and generally has it available.
However I belive in most situations this is the exception not the rule. People have a certain ammount of free time and a certain ammount of money each month and can't easilly trade one for the other.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I use my desktop to run a 24/7 Minecraft server from home. The bandwidth is sufficient for a few friends, which is all I would ever need. I bought hardware that idles at a low wattage, so the whole rig draws about 50 watts at idle, making it cost ~$55.00 per year, since it will be idle the vast majority of the time. Sure, sometimes I bring the server down for a while to do other stuff, but who cares? It's a Minecraft server for a couple of friends who hardly ever sign on anyhow, so uptime doesn't really matter. The difference between me and TFA is that I'm not using a separate server, so for me the hardware and maintenance IS free -- I would have to invest in them regardless of whether I were running a Minecraft server.
The hardware and software costs of a home server will probably save some money. But there is another cost associated with managing a server: support Who will be updating and maintaining this server? doing backups? fixing crashed at 2AM? These are on-going costs that should be considered.
However, if your son is looking for an educational experience by all means have him take care of the server with you footing the bill for hardware and power.
The family is supposedly pinching pennies, and yet they're worried about their kid's Minecraft server? Seriously?
No hardware costs
No bandwidth costs
No time costs
No backups (data, PC, bandwidth)
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
If just for Minecraft, I've found it a lot less tedious to just rent a server space from one of those services like Kerplunc. $5/mo for a vanilla server up to 5 people concurrent (+$1 per person). They (and I assume others) tack on extras for Bukkit, FTB, etc, but my family really just prefers the virtual lego experience. Probably until they get older. Aside from cost, the other nice thing is if there's an issue, I just submit a ticket. I've already done my time for God and Country when it comes to building and administrating ;)
they'd probably get a cheap LOUD (jet engine fans) server,
From the article it's pretty clear this is a repurposed desktop so probablly neither super-quiet or "jet engine loud".
As long as it's not in a room where someone sleeps I doubt noise will be a problem.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Video cards, by a huge margin.
You can get a mutli TB drive for $100, a barely passible GPU costs that much.
Home server also operates as your NAS. Sorry, but a VPS will not serve my XBMC playback boxes HD video at 100Mbps. 1 HP microserver works fantastic as a 4TB NAS plus home server running everything else. it idles at 4Watts of power used.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I used to have my domain hosted on a hosting site's VPS, It cost me monthly, but I also had far less control over my domain, e-mail, and anti-spam. I was also restricted on services I could run on my own domain.
I took an old computer, installed linux, moved my dns pointer home, now I have full control of the server and domain. If I need to deal with a hack, I can. I have complete control of how in coming spam is handled, and I can run any services I want, game services, chat, web apps, and no one else can dictate what I can do on my server.
It's saved me hunreds of dollars over the years. When I replace my desktop computer, the old desktop is recycled to be a server upgrade, since my desktop is always a better machine than my server.
I've been in IT for over 30 years, and this has taught me a lot. I've been able to turn the skills and knowledge I've gained to my job as well.
In the end, it's been a win win all the way around.
Oh woe is us and our money problems! We need to solve the pressing issue of our son's Minecraft server!
#firstmotherfuckingworldproblems
Bandwidth and financial costs are not the only problems. As a residential customer, he probably has an agreement with an ISP that he will not host his own server. His Internet could be cut off over this.
Bandwidth? Do bits just appear at the NIC via some temporal quantum process (for free!)?
No but most home connections aren't metered and most vps packages come with a fair chunk of bandwidth. So this is an issue in the feasibility side but unlikely to be part of the financial calculations.
Domain name (most hosting and a few VPS will include the first domain name).
Most vps services don't and even if they did IMO only idiots buy their domain name from the same people they buy their hosting from.
Is he even allowed via TOS to put a server on a home connection? How much extra is a dedicated IP?
Depends where he lives, round here servers are not usually banned and most customers get a public IP. The IP isn't static but that is something you can live with.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The answer will vary by area and need. I pay a flat rate for bandwidth and electricity so it makes sense to maintain a server at home. I got a friend to donate an old machine on its way to the garbage heap, slapped Linux on it and it does duty as testbed and backup server. Basically, given my power rates and the low cost of getting the machine up and running (a CD and a hard drive) I am a long way ahead hosting at home. Now, if I had variable electrical rates or if I wanted to serve up content to the web at large and had to upgrad my contract with my ISP then I'd probably consider a third-party VPS solution.
I would have thought it obvious that the home server would be cheaper. The big question is performance. If you've got the upstream speed sufficent for the job, then cool! You win. If you have ADSL, then you lose (unless the application is particularly undemanding).
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Someone needs to mod the parent up, this is important. Comcast's Internet service TOS states specifically that any server is a violation and they will cut you off if they find one, and pretty much any other non-business ISP will do the same. This is because they pay for packets going out of their network but get to charge for packets coming in, and so they throttle subscribers' outbound side while opening up the inbound side as much as technically possible.
Putting a server on your computer on their network means that lots and lots of people will be pulling packets from your server onto the network, and the ISP will be paying for it, and they don't want to pay for it.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
A video card for a server should be pretty cheap ... unless the server is specifically using it (Cg / CUDA) for some server process ..
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
And they are pretty fast, after the first year its still insanely cheap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is incorrect.
The balance of payments for electricity generation in Germany has been positive.
They have sold their renewable increased peak time generation capacity to nuclear-hobbled France and bought less and cheaper night time electricity from France.
Their net payments are an influx of billions a year from France.
I've run a server at home 24/7 for coming up on a decade. It does all our e-mail, runs a web server, runs a CCTV system and is a filtering proxy for the kids. For a long time it was one of only two Alien Arena master servers. And actually the uptime has been better than the shared hosting we used to have before we went for home serving. There is no additional cost when it comes to adding more web domains (running it as a virtual host), and it can be an ssh tunnelled proxy for when you're away from home.
The downsides?
If it goes down when you're on holiday, it stays down. You'd need someone to have keys to the house to go reset it.
If the hardware fails, it's you that has to fix it. If you run any moderately successful sites from it then you start getting calls. This added pressure can be stressful.
You're solely responsible for keeping it secure, so you'll have to stay on top of that, and keep monitoring it for intrusion. Heaven forbid you accidentally set up an open mail relay. Your ISP would crucify you :)
Most DSL is asymmetric which isn't ideal for servers, as most of the content is outbound. Plus it's easy to hit your maximum DSL monthly bandwidth allowance (vnstat is your friend!). If you don't think you have one, you may well discover in short order that actually, you do ;) Then you end up hunting around for deals that give greater bandwidth allowances. All more hassle!
Then there is the leccy cost, so you'll need a nice lightweight server (and unplug everything from it that isn't a hard drive, CPU or memory). Really this is the least of your worries considering everything else above.
All of that said, I wouldn't be without mine. It's far too useful.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
VPS is great for hosting websites, off site backup, etc.
Home server is great as a NAS, keeping all your movies, music in a central place. Fast large backups - eg save that entire video project.
So maybe the answer is to have a home server which backs stuff up. Then at a slower rate it can back stuff up on the VPS.
(Doesn't the pogoplug work something like this.)
I put together a two node cluster with a 5.x TB RAID-10 iSCSI SAN for something around $3000. The storage (QNAP TurboNAS 669) was the most expensive item. I went with MicroATX motherboards for size, but was limited to 32 GB RAM per board and a single Core-i5 quad core Ivy Bridge CPU. Boot is diskless via USB flash.
I run VMware because I get NFR keys from work, but there are free virtualization systems available, even from VMware.
The big picture advantage is that you get a lot of bang for your buck -- 64 GB (total) RAM and 5.x TB of disk buys you a lot of VMs, enough to run some some as "production" and some in tire-kicking lab mode.
I keep thinking "next time" I'll try the paid/hosted route but it seems unlikely I'll get nearly 6 TB of disk + 8 cores + 64 GB of RAM at any kind of a monthly price that would make sense.
Even if this system is nearly obsolete in 4 years, it's hard to see a hosted solution competing with this on cost and flexibility.
If you're going to consider the "opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff" then maybe you ought to also consider the opportunity costs of those activities too.
"Son, we could play catch in the back yard, but that's time we could be spending on setting up our home server. I dont know if I want to want to waste the afternoon on throwing the ball back 'n' forth."
It all comes down to what you consider to be most important, whether for reasons of fun, education, or just plain necessity (e.g. we all have to deal with laundry). I think the value of your time may cancel out when comparing these things to one another.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Find a server someone else is hosting and play on that.
You get used to the noise (it just becomes background white noise) after a while. I've got a 48port gb switch that was annoying for a few days but now I don't even notice it anymore. Of course, if you add a few professional grade servers to that after a while it will become hard to hear yourself think but you can get used to quite a lot.
Also.. maybe not so much re-purposed consumer grade desktop machines but server class machines tend to get louder/quieter depending on load due to the fans accommodating for power usage and heat generation so a lower user server will generate less noise overall than a high use machine.
This is a Minecraft server. He's using the built-in video and it's perfectly fine.
I read the internet for the articles.
Because as far as I can tell, Minecraft doesn't support split-screen multiplayer no matter how big your monitor is. A 1080p monitor for a desktop PC is 23 inches diagonal,[1] which is bigger than the bedroom TVs used for two- to four-player GoldenEye and Smash Bros. sessions in the Nintendo 64 era. So why don't more PC games support split-screen?
[1] The diagonal measure of a monitor is sqrt(width^2 + height^2), and for 1920x1080, this is 2203 pixels. The standard density for a desktop PC monitor is 96 dots per inch according to the CSS spec, giving 22.95 inches.
None of the local ISPs, including Frontier and TWC, offer any consumer-level packages with remotely good upload speeds no matter how fast download is.
Then upgrade to business class. With some ISPs, you'll have to anyway in order to escape TOS restrictions against "running a server".
Barely passable GPU for a server? Why not a GeForce 2 in one of its PCI slots? Unless the GPU is used for server computation/CUDA, you just need something that can spit out a text console now and then.
You are also ignoring the value of your time
That really depends. You could also say that about watching TV. But managing a home server might be plenty of enjoyment as a hobby for many people. No value lost in that case.
As one already pointed out, the big flaw in the calculation is there is no hardware cost. That's fine for right now, but run this analysis out for 5 years and you're probably going to have to replace or upgrade some hardware. Those costs are builtin to the VPS costs, with your home server they are not.
Also, if your home server completely dies, you've then got an immediate cost to replace it. With the VPS you don't have to worry about that, so you're definitely getting more redundancy from the VPS provider.
Also, I don't know what the bandwidth requirements of minecraft are, but I'm suspecting if you need such a powerful server to run it then they aren't trivial. The average home connection has only a fraction of the bandwidth available at your typical VPS. Say you've got 1 or 2 Mbps upstream at home, the VPS probably has 100 Mbps - big difference there.
Last point, running servers may be against your service provider's TOS, in which case if they ban you then this is a moot exercise anyway.
have the kid stop playing minecraft and get a job
That depends on the kid's age and the child labor laws in effect in a given jurisdiction. I don't see anything in the article about whether or not Derrick is 18 yet.
A $2380 computer today is worth approximately $0 in ten years. Pretending for a moment that the depreciation is linear, you lose $238 per year for owning that computer.
Not to mention bandwidth costs, maintenance (you gonna fend off all those Chinese hackers yourself?), air conditioning, lying awake at night wondering if your server's still running...
Look, running a server is a fine hobby. But don't pretend you're running a business here. How many businesses do you know that do their own hosting?! If it was so cost-effective, they surely would be.
A Geforce 2 uses much too much energy to be cost efficient. Servers should run headless or use the chipset integrated graphics.
Homer Simpson: Welcome to the internet, my friend, how can I help you?
Comic Book Guy: I'm interested in upgrading my 28.8 kilobaud internet connection to a 1.5 megabit fiber optic T1 line. Will you be able to provide an IP router that's compatible with my token ring ethernet LAN configuration?
Homer Simpson: [stares blankly for a few seconds] Can I have some money now?
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
How many people will be playing? My youngest brother runs a online Minecraft (Bukkit) server. Early on, we determined that we didn't have the upload bandwidth needed to run one for more than a few people simultaneously. About a month and a half ago, he started hosting again after a break. He now has about 25 people on at a time most of the day and has pulled in enough "donations" to cover all his costs so far with a few hundred dollars leftover. The extra money comes to less than minimum wage seeing that he spends almost all his free time managing/playing it. I think he is hoping that once he can get 100+ people playing that he can start making some real money.
All in all, if your son is resourceful and willing to put the time and energy into figuring out how to properly manage a server and attract new players, he can get some hosting and a Buycraft account and make at least enough money for the server to pay for itself.
As far as who to host with, I think my brother uses BeastNode although he said he was considering trying another company of which I can't remember the name. If I find out, I will reply to this comment and add it.
The main issue is control inputs. Windows doesn't support more than one mouse input
For one thing, Windows since Windows XP has offered the Raw Input API. Rag Doll Kung Fu anyone? For another, Windows since Windows 98 has offered support for multiple gamepads through DirectInput and later XInput. Gamepad users could use the control bindings for the existing port of Minecraft to Xbox 360.
How does one value one's time, anyways?
You know, more people should ask themselves this question. Everyone's answer is a little different, but they all boil down to an analysis of opportunity cost. You only have so many hours in the day/month/year/life. There are lots of things to do, but you can't do them all at once, so while you are doing one thing, you are losing out on the opportunity to be doing something else. For me, I value my hobby time at about 3 times what I make at work. Build a computer or buy a computer? Well, I'll probably spend 6 hours finding and ordering parts for a computer above what I would just ordering one. Then there's the time to assemble, and the added risk of building your own. Given my level of disposable income, the amount of free time I have, and the enjoyment (or complete lack thereof) that I'd have in building my own system, I'd probably have to save $2k to make it worth my time.
When I was in college, and I had very little disposable income, saving even $100 was worth it, so I built my own systems.
As a side note, this is why I should (and do) pay a higher tax rate. The value of my last $1k of income is much lower now than when I was in college, but the value of stable and effective governance only grows as I get more wealth.
How the heck did your ISP figure it out, with such a small user base?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I have Century Link with 20Mb down and 5Mb down for $60 a month including a static IP which adds all of $5 a month to the cost. They even opened up port 25 at no cost so I can run outbound SMTP if I need it for testing user registration, etc. Incoming is blocked.
I always run a home server because I have no restrictions on disk space or services I can run, I need the system anyway, I need the internet connection anyway, etc. So there's no additional out of pocket cost except $5 a month for the static IP. I'm certainly not running anything that's going to use up the available bandwidth.
If what you're doing on your server brings in enough money to warrant an upgrade, then upgrade. There's no reason to shell out extra money for something that brings in no money. Unless that's just what you want to spend your money on.
Work Safe Porn
Does a Homer Server run on beer and donuts?
DynDNS buy your own domain name. Don't you have an old laptop lying around that you can put to good use? Unlimited bytes up/down, not great bandwidth but who cares?
...
I agree with the principle of what you're saying, but I do think people miss out on certain longer term opportunities. For example, I could do any number of home improvement tasks and save some significant amount of money. Probably $1000 - $3000/year depending on what I chose to have others do (lawn care, house cleaning, gutters, etc.). But I have to weigh that against potential opportunities. If I spend that $1000 - $3000/year and take that time and invest it in learning something relevant to my career, or networking, or some other career related activity, it's very conceivable that I could increase my salary to compensate for the cost of outsourcing those services.
It's definetly not apples to apples, as there is no aquisition cost stated for the home server, just the upgrades that will make it serve its new life. Which is fine for him, but not good for anyone else trying to objectively figure out the same for their own circumstance.
That said - I investigated the same, and ultimately wound up setting up a server at home as well. I actually invested money into it, buying a new Intel i7 machine, a pair of 2 TB hard drives to go along with the 1 TB driver it came with, and boosted the RAM to 16 GB. Yes, it was an investment, comparitively speaking. But for that investment, I've got:
A Fileserver from Turnkey Linux, which I look at as a Dropbox replacement, except the space is essentially unlimited and the data resides on my own computer rather than on Amazon's; I can access it via the web or via an iPhone app, though.
An SSH Gateway to the rest of my house. Currently, it runs CentOS, but will be creating an OpenBSD VM specifically for that purpose (yes, I know that Theo would disapprove, but it seems to me that all things being equal, if a VM is going to be used anyway, may as well go with the one that's likely more secure, even though it would seem from the dated conversations I've read, that he'd say the security of the system is shot for running in a VM).
Several other instances that I can spin up as desired; a Windows 7 VM (by recyling the OEM original license that came with the machine, which I assume is legal), so I can access Quickbooks when needed from anywhere, a dedicated Centos Solr Server which is running for a test project, and several other dedicated VM's that I need from time to time..
And lots of spare capacity to boot. I'd hate to see what my monthly charges would be for this many dedicated VM's from a cloud provider. And I definitely appreciate KVM's ability to compartmentalize processes, while sharing the underlying hardware. Much cheaper this way, I think, than having 7 or 8 VM's at Amazon, some always on, others turning on and off as needed. And far cheaper than dedicating a different machine to each task, both up front and in terms of recurring (electricity) charges.
But basically - I'd think it would be expecting something for nothing to think that you could take a 24/7 computer and make your costs go down by putting it in the cloud. The provider has the same costs as you, maybe the negotiate cheaper rates for electricity, but after that, they then have to pay staff and turn a profit. That probably changes some once you're talking tens or hundreds of servers, and especially does once you're using them on demand rather than having your instances run 24/7. But for a single server, I don't think you'd find a cost savings going to the cloud if you look at it over the long run. The downside is you need to pay your fixed costs up front, rather than amortizing them across the life of your VM usage if you went to the cloud.
A Geforce 2 uses much too much energy to be cost efficient. Servers should run headless or use the chipset integrated graphics.
According to a quick web search, a Geforce 2 MX uses 4W. Even high-end PCI cards of that era probably didn't use more power than the PCI slot could provide, which appears to be 25W.
But yes, you're probably better off with whatever integrated graphics chip is on the motherboard.
Well, to be fair, he is talking about doing something with his child and most people have outsourced that to the state.
So cheap that it is included in the motherboard.
You're correct; the value of that governance goes up, because you have more to protect. That's why a PROPORTIONAL tax of x% from everyone, which GOES UP AS YOU EARN MORE, is the only "fair" system.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I wish I had mod points for this. After work hours, my 'time' can only be traded for more 'time', the exchange rate for tired engineer post 5pm labor is not much.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
When considering running a home server there's many more important issues to consider than marginal savings on the power bill vs. hosting monthly charges.
1) Dynamic addressing. This can be overcome with dynamic DNS but requires you to have a bit more sophisticated networking knowledge and equipment.
2) Port blocking. Many ISP's block incoming connections on common ports (usually 1-1024) as both a security measure and as a way of enforcing businesses don't run with residential internet packages.
3) Upstream speeds. Most residential internet packages are geared towards content consumption and therefore have asynchronous connections heavily geared towards download speeds which are relatively useless for hosting content.
4) Disaster recovery. It's difficult to match the disaster recovery of a typical VPS provider in your house. Are you going to have a virtual cluster for hardware failover, dual controller SAN storage and offsite replication? I doubt it.
I'd say the bottom line is: don't try to host anything important at home. Buck up and pay for a service from someone who knows what they are doing.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Sure, you can replace a PS or HD for less than the annual savings, but what if something bigger than that goes out?
I have run a lot of computers over the years, and pretty much the only thing that dies are hard drives and fans (the ones with moving parts, and that's not a coincidence). Yes, we've all had some other thing release the magic smoke, but I suspect that the vast majority were caused by some motor dying first (like a power supply or video card if the cooling fan seizes).
These days, you won't lose a whole motherboard or CPU because of a fan dying, and a good power supply will just shut down instead of burning up, so there really isn't anything "bigger" than $50 or so that you might have to replace.
I prefer to pipe headless servers out the serial console. That way I can just plug in a laptop instead of dragging out a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I should see if that works on my headless server that I use a GUI nx session on. I've been hesitant to test.
Cheap storage VM.
I agree, it irritates me when I hear people complain they are on a fixed income. Aren't we all on a fixed income? I know I can't rack up the OT whenever I fell like it.
Cheap storage VM.
Are they trying to pinch pennies in general or just pinch pennies with a server? I guess I am a bit old fashioned, but if they are really trying to pinch pennies then why bother with a home server to run Minecraft? Talk about a first world problem.
That kind of noise can create background tension over time and harm your hearing. I used to pop earplugs if I was in the data center for more then an hour or so, because I would just get tense and irritated from the noise over a long period. I would try finding some quieter fans. I pulled the fan entirely from a 24 port switch that I use and have had no issues. I use maybe a dozen ports at any given time.
Cheap storage VM.
If the dad has to put time into this then you need to estimate what his time is worth - in particular the opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff.
If he's doing much of his work with his son, then he's getting a good return on time spent.
Clearly it has some major design flaws to require that incredible amount of resources.
The nominal price here is like 8 cents. But I am a small user. the endless fees at the bottom of the bill double the effective price.
In San Diego, the current Total Electric rate for 200% over baseline (and it's pretty hard not be be 200% over baseline...) is .29.
Rates can be deceptive, as in many areas there are separate charges for electricity generation, transport, plus various taxes and surcharges.
So, if Ryan moves to San Diego, he can expect to spend $32.18/month to keep his server running.
VPS wins, and on so many other different fronts, as well.
- He's probably violating his ISP's TOC. Upgrading to proper service will probably cost at least as much as the electricity, doubling the cost vs. a VPS
- Crappy bandwidth, as most home service is asymetrical - low bandwidth up, high bandwidth down. He needs the opposite.
- VPSs have power backup
- VPSs typically have good disk backup options
- VPSs typically have huge burst bandwidth
- You can choose where to host your VPS. For the U.S. Texas is a good bet (central, well-connected)
I had been running a smallish Minecraft server at home on a dedicated IP address for about a year and a half. It's an older Lenovo Core 2 Duo with 8GB and a 80GB sata running Slack64 and the game located on a 160GB sata.
My residential internet is 35 down and 15 up. I was able to host about 10 - 15 players with no problems.
I DID end up moving the server PC to an empty room as the fan noise did get annoying at times.
I decided to move to a hosted site for my server as I was growing and my power bill was averaging $25 a month to run the server, routers and switches dedicated. I pay $49 a month for 8 cores, 3GB and 320GB. I have 2TB bandwidth per month and have never reached it. Even when pulling huge offsite backups once. :)
I figure I am paying $30 more a month to have someone else host it. After seeing what MC does to a PC running at 100% CPU for a year and a half? I'll let someone elses hardware take that beating. I had to replace several bad caps on it.
The old Lenovo now lives a simple life at work as my test computer for Linux and BSD projects.
Now, I can host ~100 with the bandwidth and I can increase or decrease my memory as needed. PLUS, its MY machine. I installed my own OS on it. I control everything. So, its like I still have a PC in my spare room even though its physically in the Mid West somewhere.
Motherboards , in my experience are the flakiest part, even from reputable vendors.
Good-bye
I know exactly what it takes to run a a server, having run over 100 of them at a time for a previous employer, all Linux boxes. Eyes wide open here. And yes, my son is learning from this too. Its new to him, and a good experience.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
A barely passable GPU can be had for $40.
A GPU for $100 may require special power connections than your current power supply can accomodate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Do you eat hamburgers every day? For breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Hopefully you don't. A varied diet of activities is just as healthy for the mind as a varied diet of food is for the body.
nmap -v -sS -T 5 ($isp/network)
That's like 5 times what it should cost. It might actually be cheaper for you to run gas lamps and candles in your home.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I don't think you know what it means to "consider the value of your time." The only way it would amount to you doing nothing is if you valued your time more than what it costs to have someone else do those activities for you, and you have the money to pay for it. I don't normally pay someone to get my food at the store for me because it costs more than what I value the little time that would save, not because I ignored the value of my time. However, on those days I had to work a long day and really value taking it easy for the hour or two off I have, I would consider paying someone to deliver a meal.
Saves money until it's hit by a zero day vulnerability exposing your home network. Best to keep them apart IMO.
It's my understanding that running such services would only be problematic when the usage has been noticed to be unusually high.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Other people could use that time for e.g. watching the TV, but is that really any more a valuable way of spending one's time?
Also just because I make "skilled craftsman" type hourly rates (about as much per hour as a plumber) unlike a plumber I can only realistically get precisely 40 hrs per week. Not 39, not 41, but exactly 40 hrs at that rate.
That is the crucial difference between salary and hourly. As a welder, you would get a nice 50% rate bonus if you have to work late. (Sometimes 100%, depending on local laws, holidays...) As a salaried worker, you get to work late for free.
So the poor outlook of your free time being worthless, since you cannot realistically earn much in those few marginal extra hours, largely depends on the status of being on salary. If you were not on salary, you may have the outlook that your free time is very valuable. I also chose welder rather than plumber for my example because self-employed trades tend to be vastly over-billed. The plumber's helper that actually unclogs the shit gets little more than minimum wage, even though you got charged $125/hour.
Salary really sucks. Compare the cost of hiring out tedious tasks like cleaning the pool against the amount of time it would take to cover it at 150% your normal rate. In my case, I can spend 2 hours per week vacuuming, brushing, balancing chemicals, scrubbing filters, all that fun stuff - or I could just put in 2 extra hours per month and hire a pool service company. Then compare that with how much extra time you have to work at a salary job. Uh oh, I guess you can't divide by zero...
In a task scenario, I work it out as a ratio of hours in vs out. In the pool example, 2 in, 8 out, nets me 6 more hours of free time per month. That's a pretty good deal. In a hobby scenario it doesn't really work that way. It all goes back to the GP post, questioning the value of a way of spending time. To them I say, who the fuck are you to say what's more valuable to me?
Modded Minecraft (ie tekkit) is an absolute bandwidth hog. At three people connected for periods of 8 hours a day it's not uncommon to see 90g/month in data traffic. Make sure your ISP account can handle it. Vanilla minecraft is less demanding but the modded variants are taxing.
There's not enough information given in the article to know whether this was a good or bad decision. What kind of bandwidth do they have at home? Minecraft servers kinda need bandwidth, and if they have a 768k up DSL, that's going to be one laggy MC server. As the server scales to the point where you NEED 3GB of ram, you're going to need a lot of upstream bandwidth. I'd say that 3GB of RAM will get you about 30 players, which will eat up about 12MBit/s of upload speed.
And that's just a preliminary bandwidth analysis.
Running a server is more than about being cheap, it's about doing what works. I'm not saying it would definitely be cheaper to use a VPS, but I AM saying that the analysis in the article is very much lacking.
I have a box in my office built out of intel workstation parts* (which are pretty much intel server parts with some minor tweaks) and i've found that while it does get quieter at low load the sound actually gets more annoying because it pulsates.
Mind you on the rare occasions when the fans do spool up to full blast (the only time they seem to do this now is during POST but when I first built the thing it ran them on full blast continuously, it took me a while how to figure out how to tell the board what case it was in) it does sound like a vaccum cleaner.
*IIRC the only parts in the box that were not from Intel were the ram and the hard drives.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
That is the crucial difference between salary and hourly. As a welder, you would get a nice 50% rate bonus if you have to work late.
You're confusing "if you have to" with "I want to". There's a huge difference between being ordered to work extra or get fired, vs, I'd like to work an extra hour today. If no one wants to sign off on overtime that day, you aren't getting a 41st hour, doesn't matter if you want it or not.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is definitely a good way to go. One user mentioned the hardware cost. For a home server (a file server or similar), you can get hardware almost for free, if not for free. We run a PIII 667 with a gigabit card running CentOS 6 and it is very fast and extremely flexible since we can also do tape backups and a list of other things since it is running GNU/Linux. The older PIII or PII machines use less electricity as well, which is another benefit.
Want to pinch pennies? Don't run a fucking minecraft server.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
It's an interesting analysis to compare the prices for VPS versus home servers. And the considerations for hardware upgrades and possible downtime are valid. So I'm glad to have read this article. But you have a teensy flaw in your calculations. Your basis for the power usage calculations are based on a number which is pulled out of thin air. Well, it's a decent educated guess. But that's it: it's a guess. Get a watt meter or an amp-clamp and measure the system's AC mains usage during heavy usage by clients on the game server. Then you will have accurate calculations.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
How much your time is worth is not just a function of earnings, but of convenience and pleasure. Is it worth $10 an hour if you don't have to work on a computer that you've worked on 100 times? You might only earn $2-3/hr outside of work, but you have a finite amount of time. If you can do something you love instead of fixing that server, it might be worth $25/month, including backups, to get a 512 Linode node.
Sure, the first few problems are interesting and unique, but once you're an expert is it really worth 3 hours to tear down and rebuild that server when the motherboard dies?
What about maintenance and backups? Are you really interested in managing all of that?
A low cost home server (US$100) is the Tonido Plug. It is an embedded Ubuntu Linux PC in a small box with a built-in 115 -230V-50/60Hz power supply using approx 5 Watts . The latest model can accommodate a HD. The only other connection is a ethernet network connection. ,you can install a USB stick or SDHC card as I do . ,if the SDHC card ever gets full I can install a USB hub with more solid state memory devices; the sky is the limit. ,use keywords: Tonido Plug
Personally I use the earlier version requiring 10-20Watts , same 115-230V power connection an ethernet socket and a USB2 socket into which I have plugged a 64GB SDHC memory card plugged into a USB caddy . So no moving parts . It works well both from within the home based network as well as from anywhere else
I presume that instead of installing a HD in the latest model
BTW
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