this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Depending on the provider, you can get 16GB or 96GB of RAM for less than $50/month on bare metal, which includes repairs, power, and a 1Gbps unmetered connection. Pure cloud tends to be more expensive.
I pay far less than that in actual utility usage to operate my server which has 128GB of RAM and 16TB of storage space. I've just allocated 300GB of that for Mastodon and 300GB for Lemmy for now.
The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.
There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that's someone else's problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.
How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don't risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can't do anything about it. Maybe you're on vacation, and you don't have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you're sick, or just extremely busy that week.
You're not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn't, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.
I see maintenance as a part of the joy and learning of the hobby, much as a gardener enjoys the hard work of moving heavy bags of soil around. It's all very much up to the individual. Some hobbyists have a deeper passion for it than others and that is perfectly okay.
Fair point, if you've factored in the full TCO for both hardware and utilities... and/or if you're using it for other stuff too.
To be honest, the homelab for me is not completely a cost/benefit analysis. Sure, I'd save money if I calculated my time spent. But for me this is a hobby so I don't put a monetary value on my time spent. Everything I am doing is learning so I am actually getting value from it. The hardware I obtained second hand from a local swap meet. My utilities have gone up much less than the cost of renting a VPS.