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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OK, but why?
Well, for fun and as a cool hobby project, I get that. That is enough to justify it, like any other crazy hobbyist project. Don't let me stop you.
But in the spirit of practicality and speaking hypothetically: Why set it up that way?
For self-hosting why not build a few standalone machines and run off that instead? The reason to do this large scale is optimizing resources so you can assign a smaller pool of hardware to users as they need it, right? For a home set of two or three users you'd probably notice the fluctuations in performance caused by sharing the resources on the gaming VMs and it would cost you the same or more than building a couple reasonable gaming systems and a home server/NAS for the rest. Way less, I bet, if you're smart about upgrades and hand-me-downs.
Yep this has been my hold up. It is mostly just a solution in search of a problem.
The best use case I have come up with is if you have an nice computer and an extra GPU laying around. You could turn the single computer into two workstation/gaming computers.
Yeah, but if you're this deep into the self hosting rabbit hole what circumstances lead to having an extra GPU laying around without an extra everything else, even if it's relartively underpowered? You'll probably be able to upgrade it later by recycling whatever is in your nice PC next time you upgrade something.
At this point most of my household is running some frankenstein of phased out parts just to justify my main build. It's a bit of a problem, actually.
Mainly because running multiple desktop machines adds up to a lot of power, even at idle. If you power them off and on as needed it's better, but then it's not as convenient. Of course, if you leave a single machine with multiple GPUs on 24/7 that will also eat a lot of power, but it will be less than multiple machines turned on 24/7 at least.
And the physical space taken up by multiple desktop machines starts to add up significantly, particularly if you live in an apartment or smaller house.
I guess that depends on the use case and how frequently both machines are running simultaneously. Like I said, that reasoning makes a lot of sense if you have a bunch of users coming and going, but the OP is saying it's two instances at most, so... I don't know if the math makes virtualization more efficient. It'd pobably be more efficient by the dollar, if the server is constantly rendering something in the background and you're only sapping whatever performance you need to run games when you're playing.
But the physical space thing is debatable, I think. This sounds like a chonker of a setup either way, and nothing is keeping you from stacking or rack-mounting two PCs, either. Plus if that's the concern you can go with very space-efficient alternatives, including gaming laptops. I've done that before for that reason.
I suppose it's why PC building as a hobbyist is fun, there are a lot of balance points and you can tweak a lot of knobs to balance many different things between power/price/performance/power consumption/whatever else.