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."

Comments

Can you replace your whole system for that price?

[damn_registrars]

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.

Seriously, Slashdot?

[ledow]

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.

Re:Free Hardware

[Phreakiture]

As always, location is key. I pay $0.17/kWh where I am located. I know for a fact that one of my friends who lives on the other end of the state only pays around $0.065/kWh, and I have heard that folks to my south pay as much as $0.25/kWh, all inside the bounds of one state.

Re:Free Hardware

[mcrbids]

There's a time and place for everything. For most techie types, you can do fantastic amounts of real work with free hardware. I have a number of such embedded servers working for me, junkers from the back closet and past upgrades.

I still have a 500 Mhz Pentium III running 24x7 as a network monitor! 10 years of continuous, 24x7 service and it is still chugging along, currently running a 32 bit CentOS 6 distro. It burns less than 20 watts!

On the other hand, there's a time when money isn't much of an object. We have 4 32-core database servers with 128 GB of ECC RAM in each in our primary compute cluster. In absolute cost, they were not the slightest bit cheap despite being "white box" servers, but relative to the amount of work they perform, it was money very well spent.

When you have high processing loads, more powerful equipment allows you to do the same work with less administrative overhead since the number of units can be much smaller.