I often wonder if my home NAS/Server would be better off put onto a rented box or a cloud server somewhere, especially since I now have 1gbit/s internet. Even now the 20TB of drive space and 6 Cores with 32GB on Hetzner with a dedicated is about twice the price of buying the hardware over a 5 year period. I suspect the hardware will actually last longer than that and its the same level of redundancy (RAID) on a rented dedicated so the backup is the same cost between the two.

Using cloud and box storage on Hetzner is more expensive than the dedicated server, 4x owning the hardware and paying the power bill. AWS and Azure are just nuts, >100x the price because they charge so much for storage even with hard drives. Contabo nor Netcup can do this, its too much storage for them.

Every time I look at this I come to the same basic conclusion, the overhead of renting someone else’s machine is quite high compared to the hardware and power cost and it would be a worse solution than having that performance on the local network for bandwidth and latency. The problem isn't so much the compute performance, that is relatively fairly priced, its the storage costs and data transfer that bites.

Not really what the article was necessarily about but cloud is sort of meant to be good for low end hardware but its actually kind of not, the storage costs are just too high even a Hetzner Storage box.

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Nextgrid 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

It really depends on your power costs. In certain parts of Europe, power is so expensive that Hetzner actually works out cheaper (despite them providing you the entire machine and datacenter-grade internet connection).

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benjiro 5 days ago | parent [-]

Trust me, even with 35 cent/kwh (Germany), its easy to make it work. Just do not buy enterprise hardware. People are obsessed with running racks full of often obsolete hardware, that is not designed around energy efficiency.

Here is a fun one ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1dqq3h8/my_12x_...

Dude is running 12x AMD 6600HS with a power draw between 300 a 400W. The compute alone is easily 3x of a equivalent Hetzner 48c server. We shall not mention the that inc 768GB of memory (people underestimate how much high capacity rdimms draw in power).

The main issue with Hetzner is, as long as you only use their base configuration servers, they are very competitive. The issue is, if you start to step a little bit out of line, the prices simply skyrocket. Try adding more storage to some servers, memory, or you need a higher interconnect between your servers (limited to 10Gbit).

Even basic consumer hardware comes with 2.5Gbit, yet, Hetzner is in the stone ages with 1Gbit. I remember the time when Hetzner introduced 1Gbit. Hetzner was innovation, and progression. But that has been slowly vanishing. Hetzner has been getting more and more lazy. You see the issue also with their cloud offerings storage. Look at Netcup, even Strato etc... They barely introduce anything new anymore, and when something comes its often less competitive or broken. The whole S3 costing Backblaze price levels and non-stop issues.

You can tell they are the only company that every pushed for consumer hardware hosting on mass scale, what made them a small monopoly in the market. And it shows if your a old customer, and know their history. Hey, do people remember the price increases for the auction hardware because of the Ukraine invasion. Do not worry folks, when the electricity prices go down, we will adjust them down. O, we are pre-war prices for almost 2 years. Where is that promised price drops? Hehehe ...

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Nextgrid 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Just do not buy enterprise hardware

But then you need to buy newer, more expensive hardware, which pushes your initial price up (divide by the amount of time you'll need to host the server to get the monthly equivalent, then add power/connectivity/maintenance and compare to Hetzner).

Btw generally the reason homelabbers flock to legacy enterprise hardware is that it generally gives you a good amount of compute for a cheap price, if you don't mind the increased power cost. This is actually fine as a lot of homelab usage is bursty and the machine can be powered off outside of those times.

	▲	benjiro 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Why do you need to buy more expensive hardware? The thing is, if you run a old Xeon server, and compare that performance vs modern consumer level hardware. Unless you are bought a 50~64 core server (and the power bill to match), your often way cheaper with consumer level hardware. Older server hardware advantage is more on the amount of total memory you can install or the amount of pcie lanes. The cheapest enterprise CPUs (AMD as example) are currently Zen2, the moment you want Zen3s, the prices go up a lot, for anything 32core or higher. I have seen so many homelab that ran ancient hardware, only for them to realize that they are able to do the same or more, on modern mini-pcs or similar hardware. Often at the fraction of the power draw. The reason why so many people loved to run enterprise hardware, was because in the US you had electricity prices in the low single digit or barely in the teens. When you get some 35 cent/kw prices, people tend to do a bit of research and find out its not the 2010's anymore. I ran multiple enterprise servers, with 384GB memory, things idled at 120W+ (and that was with temp controlled fans because those drain a ton of power). Second PSU? There goes your idle to 150W+. Ironically, just get a few minipcs and with the same memory capacity spread, your doing 50W (often less) or less. The advantage of using laptop cpus. I have had 8 core Zen3 systems, doing 4.5W in idle. And yes, you can turn off enterprise hardware but you can also sleep minipcs. And they do not tend to sound like jet engines when waking up ;) I have a minisforum itx board next to me, with 16c Zen4, cost 380 Euro. Idles at 17W. Beats any 32C Zen2 enterprise server. Even something like a AMD EPYC 7C13 (64C), will be ~40% faster and still costs 600 Euro from China. It will do better on actual multithread workloads where you can really have tons of processes but 400 bucks vs 600+400 motherboard. Just saying, enterprise has its uses, like in enterprise environments but for most people, especially homelabbers, its often overkill.

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bpye 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think I’ve settled on both being the answer - Hetzner is affordable enough that I can have a full backup of my NAS (using ZFS snapshots and incremental backups), and as a bonus can host some services there instead of at home. My home network still has much lower latency and so is preferable for ie. my Lightroom library.