Selfhosted
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.
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This is an interesting take. I prefer the other way around, because of redundancy in things like PSU and raid etc. So your take is really interesting to me. I am rethinking my setups for sure.
I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I've come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
One other thing that I'll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That's not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don't underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you're going to start having heat issues, and then you're losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there's air flow, there's a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I'm working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!
Thank you for all the information. I have had servers now for 7 years already, and honestly I still love them. I run a bit more than just seflhosting home-based applications, but I totally get your point. I am a bit older, and therefor a bit more old-school :) I sleep safely to the hum of redundant PSUs and Hardware RAID SSDs, haha.
Especially thank you for PiKVM and NanoKVM. I am looking into that a bit.
I am fully off-grid, so power cost is not that big of a deal, and the servers are far enough away for the noise not to bother me.
I am not against anything you said, honestly. And I got a lot of new info. I am going to say this though: I am still not too convinced on the software RAID thing though. Maybe I am just too stupid, but I have not been able to get this going with the same ease, and have it recover as easily as proper hardware RAID. One day I will take the leap again and try to "get with the times".
Thanks again for all the info! Honestly appreciate it.
What's your general self-hosting setup and what machines are you building for that? I'd like to have HA Proxmox running all the time on three nodes with a low power bill and lots of memory available (like 256GB) but space for memory seems to be difficult to find in a reasonable priced consumer board.
Intel AMT also works for out of band management on consumer hardware.
I don't think I've ever had a quality brand PSU go out on me. Software RAID like MD or ZFS works fine on basically any hardware, and I wouldn't use hardware RAID these days anyways.
I used to worry about that stuff and use enterprise hardware, but its just so expensive for decent performance, and so power hungry.
Like try and match even a budget i3-12100 or similar for single thread performance (needed for game servers mostly) and you really can't with used enterprise gear. Plus that i3 has an iGPU that can handle a ton of transcoding tasks, and ML for stuff like immich search or frigate object detection. And it uses about 10w or less most of the time.
I got a server for free and at one point, over half of my energy bill was for storing movies and nextcloud. Depends on the energy cost where you live, but for that price I could have paid for the highest tier of some cloud office suite that doesn't run slow like nextcloud, and the highest plan of netflix.
Of course i chose self hosting, but this time with energy efficient hardware, server now takes 50 watts peak, with 4 hdds and an nvme. Asrock rack motherboard, with IPMI.