Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Also keep in mind that many ISPs frown on running home servers. If the server gets popular it could be a problem for the provider.