Hi, i currently renting a server as Hetzner for about 90-100 euro/month
I was thinking that it might be cheaper (per year) buying my own server for like 1-3k euros and go to a co-location with the server and “only” pay for the electricity, hosting and internet, and not continuye pay for the hardware it self.
But every time i try to “pick together” “my server”, it becomes really expensive because i want to add “this and that” and have “more power than the universe” in my cpu… (which i probably dont need half of it)
I currently got something like 20TB harddrives (summed up), 128 GB of ram.
I would need atleast 10TB storage… perhaps even closer to 100 GB for offsite (off-home backup) Need some space to test virtual machines of what ever i want to test/do today.
Currently i only run 3 servers that is java based, semi-moderate cpu usage, moderate to high storage usage both in space and “traffic”. No time sensetive that needs to happen i real-time.
Any idea of what kind of hardware i should look at, limit to how powerfull cpu do i really need and stuff like this.
128GB of ram, is nice to have… but i dont think i need more than 32-64GB ram for my current usage.
And hardware/storage… it becomes quite expensive if you skip the consumer level stuff.
My initial idea getting this server was to host my own mail server for my 3-5 domains. Host my business low-trafic webpage (almost no trafic to the site, almost no content so basically more or less a static page or three). VM’s to test/seperate other stuff that i either need or want to test/do.
I often look at bargainhardware.co.uk for refurb server and hardware, and even here (post-brexit) the server gets really expensive.
Try to scale down and have offsite backup at a friends home.
For what you try to do, in Intel nuc would likely do. You just need backup storage in addition.
For backup you can think about cloud storage. Backup-tier is like 1$/mo/TB.
Try emailing a local company that hosts stuff, if you’re in a large area. They can usually work with you on providing the service you’re looking for.
Many years ago I built my own 1u server, built on consumer parts, I filled it with drives and memory. Co-location costs including tax was £56 per month, cheapest available in the country at the time. Other costs I didn’t account for were gaining access to the machine to fix or upgrade parts, driving to the data centre.
Generally it was good experience, satisfying having almost total control over my platform. Do it for the experience.
But Hetzner is difficult to beat for overall value.
Sounds like you need a beast of a server!
Change your approach.
My Homelab are 4 Wyse 5070 J5005 from eBay (100€ each), each pimped to 32 GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Each gives 4 cores and 10 GHz.
Totals to 40 GHz CPU and 128 GByte RAM. With some external disks and OPNSense Firewall the entire setup pulls 40 W in use providing 16 containers in total for 12 users. Each Wyse pulls 5.5W on average and is at 0.35 15Min load.
I run Seafile CE, IOBroker, Jump, Audiobookshelf, Taiga, Vaultwarden, Gitea, Immich, Paperless-ngx, Vikunja, Tandoor and others
Offsite store using rclone to Backblaze.