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.
Make a spreadsheet of where your money is going.
https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
Or then you can just realize that the time you spend is spent not making money and you need to save time, not services.
You only need to eat two meals a day, really.
Run less stuff.
Im quite new in selfhosting, but I highly recommend power meter for home server if you dont have one. Its easy to tell the difference after any change in your setup. I was surprised with numbers when I was testing different PSUs on DIY PC. All PSUs were overkill (550-750W) for my tiny server (they are not made for that low power), but some cheap models were better than more expensive PSU. I was meassuring from 22-28 W iirc on idle. Its only 6W difference, but thats like 25%. I dont use VPS because I have no need for that and even cheap ones are more expensive than running my home server. Some servers can run at <10W and raspberry pi use even less power
It is a little dangerous to do in case you experience a crash or a power failure, but you can get a lot more bang for the buck from your server hardware if you have a decent amount of memory by tuning your different system components to keep more data in memory and write to disk less often. This can be done with sysctl.conf and dirty writes, or with php or MySQL using more working memory and not writing to disk as often.
It was particularly required when I was still using a spinning drive, since random io was a show stopper. Even using a decent sata SSD it can be beneficial however, letting the system choose to write at more opportune moments instead of doing it in the middle of read ops.
