this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
37 points (93.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40198 readers
569 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'll just come out and say it: 50W. I know, I know an order of magnitude above what's actually needed to host websites, media center and image gallery.

But it is a computer I had on-hand and which would be turned on a quarter of the day anyway. And these 50W also warm my home, although this is less efficient than the heat pump, of course.

What's your usage? What do you host?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that's your metric. Either way, it's not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.

If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it's really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.

[–] Bizarroland@kbin.social 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago

$10/month is one drink in the pub on one Friday night out of four. It's not even a movie ticket.

European electricity rates are closer to $0.30, and I agree that 100W 24/7 is a cost worth being aware of. I think we're seeing in this thread that it's pretty easy to find a system with standard PC parts from the past decade that idles in the 50W range, like OP, even with a couple of HDDs, and $50/year (US), even $150/year (EU), electricity cost to keep an old desktop out of a landfill maybe doesn't seem so bad.

I mean, one should think hard whether their home lab really needs a second full system running for failover, or whether they really need a separate desktop-based system just for NAS. And maybe don't convert your old gaming rig and its GPU to a home server. Or the quad-Xeon server that work is 'just giving away,' even if it would be cool to have a $50,000 computer running in the basement.