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.
My least favourite (and only) method for me to cut costs is reduce my energy consumption.
I already have a super cheap setup (used Mini-PC for 50 bucks, old SSDs I had lying around, etc.), so reducing the hardware costs more isn’t possible.
But, without tweaks, this setup would eat 15W (idle) and 25W (under load) electricity. At least, thats the case atm.
I just started selfhosting to be fair, and I didn’t have time to throttle the server. I use it mainly as NAS, so speed isn’t as important in this case as for other services like webapps, where reactivity is needed.
The CPU isn’t too bad, so, even when reducing the performance to 50%, it should still work.
Also, I will try to change the active cooling fan to a passive heat sink, that might reduce the bill further.
What mainly eats resources like crazy is my Nextcloud AIO. I try to follow the UNIX-principle as good as I can, and NC doesn’t follow it well, at least for my use case.
I only need a file server, and NC is pretty “bloated” with talk, calender, and so on. So I disabled all of that.
But, I’m not capable enough to set up an Online-FTP-Server and secure it enough without ever working in that environment. NC AIO provides a lot of comfort and “just works”. So, I’m fine with that.
Here in Germany, especially thanks to the energy crisis, electricity is absurdly expensive, and even reducing the TDP by a few % will save me much money over a year.
So, I try to reduce the load and increase efficiency wherever I can.
Still, even now, with an increased energy consumption + paid domain, it’s still cheaper than using OneDrive or something like that, even when ignoring storage size.
Fortunately, energy cost is not a big deal for me. My state (Punjab, India) provides 300 units per month for free. In the past year, I had to pay for only 6–7 months of electricity. I do host Nextcloud in a docker, but I keep most plugins disabled to save resources. One of my main resource hog is LanguageTool. It is using about 800 MB RAM and 8 GB storage.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CGNAT | Carrier-Grade NAT |
| LAMP | Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NAT | Network Address Translation |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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I see the question has been understood in two ways: cost in computer resources and money. Which one did you mean?
That’s the same thing. :) If you reduce computing load, you reduce the need for costly hardware and you reduce the need for energy, thus you reduce the amount of money needed to build and run your setup. There’s a saying in (software) engineering : “reducing energy consumption and increasing performances requires the same optimizations”. Make your code faster (by itself, not by buffing up hardware) and it consumes less energy. Make your application simpler, and it will run faster, and it will consume less energy. It’s not an absolute truth (it sometimes happen that you make your code faster and it consumes more energy), but it’s true most of the time.
