What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?
I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.
Edit: I feel the need to reduce both – the resources, to host multiple things on one system, and cost, to buy/pay for multiple systems. Currently, I have 2 ARM VPSes and 1 old MacBook Air as a home server.
Fasting allows you to waste less money on food and invest more money into your server.
Cost-cutting is corporate-greed mindset, therefore you have to solve it with the same mindset.
Fire people ! Even you if needed. And let the end-users deal with the outcome.
(This is not a serious post ^^ )
Fire your wife and kids and then you would have plenty of time and (hopefully) money to concentrate on your hobbies and the things that make you happy. /s
Not viable strategy, firing the wife incurs a 50% net worth severance package.
My favorite cost cutting tip is to avoid big webapps running on docker, and instead do with small UNIX utilities (cron instead of a calendar, text files instead of note taking app, rsync instead of a filehosting dropbox-like app, simple static webserver for file sharing, etc). This allows me to run my server on a simple Raspberry Pi, with less than 500mb of used RAM in average, and mininal energy consumption. So, total cost of the setup:
- Raspberry Pi : 77€ x 2 = 144€ (I bought two to have a backup if the first one fails)
- MicroSD 64gb : 13€ x 2 = 26€ (main and backup)
- average energy consumption : 0.41€ (2kWh) per month
With that, I run all services I need on a single machine, and I have a backup plan for recovery of both hardware and software.
Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it’s very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).
cron instead of a calendar
What do you mean by that?
Do you use crontab to save events?
Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it’s usually done by setting the MAILTO variable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).
I use that to do things like:
0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'
It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with crontab -l. If it’s not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.
And to expand further on simplicity, one can avoid using email and send messages over ntfy with just a POST curl call.
I like your setup!
Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it’s very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).
Yeah, and that’s the problem for me. See my comment above. Nextcloud and those services are “bloated”, yes, but very convenient. I never worked in an IT-environment, so I’m a total noob.
But stuff like NC AIO give me a whole pre-set-up LAMP stack without needing to know how everything works, and that’s unbelievable for me.
Honestly I’ve worked in technical fields (either support or engineering) for most of my life and sometimes I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. Sure I could combine rsync and crontab and sync files around that way on a regular basis, add lighthttpd for web browser access to the folder, and I do sometimes, but I’d also like to do things OTHER than more work. I know how to do those things, but I don’t want to do those things.
Ask yourself what part of this is your hobby. Is it building the thing and making it do as much as possible with as little as possible? Is it getting a self hosted cloud that’s polished like Google’s? Is it something else like photography or music and this is just the way you want to share or archive that? Those are all three different scenarios and is make different suggestions for each.
The usage for curl is quite interesting. Personally, perhaps I’d like a simple GUI where I can select the date and time and the message for the reminder.
I use nfs or samba for filesharing, but a webserver works well too.
What is your opinion on OCI container orchestration tools? Specifically Podman. I am of the opinion that containerisation is a most excellent idea because it uses hardware to the fullest extent without polluting the base system. Also the “use like cattle” philosophy. For example: I would be much more comfortable having the GUI for cron in a container.
- Use sqlite instead of Postgres, MariaDB
- Avoid enterprise software (Kubernetes, Elastic Search)
- Only use projects with efficient programming languages such as Go, Rust, etc.
- Try to run things bare metal
- Lookout for projects which name themself minimal or light-weight
I use a Raspberry Pi 2 to self host a Dashboard written in Rust (Axum), a RSS reader called yarr and a music streaming server Navidrome. The latter two are written in Go and very resource efficient. The electricity bill should be under a Euro a month (6.4W max power consumption).
You only need to eat two meals a day, really.
