Submitted 1 year ago by nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de to selfhosted@lemmy.world
What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?
I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.
Cost-cutting is corporate-greed mindset, therefore you have to solve it with the same mindset.
Fire people ! Even you if needed. And let the end-users deal with the outcome.
(This is not a serious post ^^ )
Fire your wife and kids and then you would have plenty of time and (hopefully) money to concentrate on your hobbies and the things that make you happy. /s
Not viable strategy, firing the wife incurs a 50% net worth severance package.
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:
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 program 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).
So basically, I 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.
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.
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.
I use a Raspberry Pi 2 to self host a Dashboard written in Rust (Axum), a RSS reader called yarr and a music streaming server Navidrome. The latter two are written in Go and very resource efficient. The electricity bill should be under a Euro a month (6.4W max power consumption).
While I don’t agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.
You only need to eat two meals a day, really.
OMAD (one meal a day) and intermittent fasting is even healthier
Running stuff on my bare metal servers is my go to cost saving measure. Why rent 2 VPSes if you can buy some old thin clients and turn them into linux servers, etc.
Two reasons, basically. First, I am behind CGNAT. Second, electricity in my area is somewhat cumbersome, I need some services to be always online.
These days you can use various services to expose your devices from behind cgnat:
Yeah this is probably my biggest.
Device which things can be hosted on a local server and which are best on a vps
My least favourite (and only) method 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.), 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 as for other services like webapps.
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.
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.
NextCloud is total bloat. HomeAssitant is trying it’s damnedest to achieve that level of bloat, but I don’t think they’ll ever catch NC.
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.
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 cost, 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 work”.
I guess that’s true and I didn’t think of it that way. I took it as buying one device over the other to run multiple vms in one machine vs running them in multiple single machines. I’m in that head space now as I’m playing that optimization game myself.
Both!
Make a spreadsheet of where your money is going.
paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/
Or then you can just realize that the time you spend is spent not making money and you need to save time, not services.
Im quite new in selfhosting, but I highly recommend power meter for home server if you dont have one. Its easy to tell the difference after any change in your setup. I was surprised with numbers when I was testing different PSUs on DIY PC. All PSUs were overkill (550-750W) for my tiny server (they are not made for that low power), but some cheap models were better than more expensive PSU. I was meassuring from 22-28 W iirc on idle. Its only 6W difference, but thats like 25%. I dont use VPS because I have no need for that and even cheap ones are more expensive than running my home server. Some servers can run at <10W and raspberry pi use even less power
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| VPS | Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) |
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It is a little dangerous to do in case you experience a crash or a power failure, but you can get a lot more bang for the buck from your server hardware if you have a decent amount of memory by tuning your different system components to keep more data in memory and write to disk less often. This can be done with sysctl.conf and dirty writes, or with php or MySQL using more working memory and not writing to disk as often.
It was particularly required when I was still using a spinning drive, since random io was a show stopper. Even using a decent sata SSD it can be beneficial however, letting the system choose to write at more opportune moments instead of doing it in the middle of read ops.
SomeBoyo@feddit.de 1 year ago
Fasting allows you to waste less money on food and invest more money into your server.