This is corny, but thanks for being awesome! It feels so nice to see this community grow out of a shared vision of what the internet should be.
Standing up my little instance has been a blast! I’m not quite done with it, but your combined enthusiasm gives me hope for the future of the internet. 😊
I’m weird, so I have 10G/40G networking and half a rack that would burn 10 kW when all fired up. My major cost issue is power, which is currently 0.7 EUR/kWh though capped at 0.4 EUR/kWh for a while. I could use some more modern hardware but it’s no longer bountiful and cheap.
That is insanely expensive electricity
I agree. Which is why I only run a firewall on a thin client, a low-power 8-core Atom C2758 Proxmox with SSDs and an external HDD and a fanless switch, all for about 70 W total 24/7/365. Any other server is one of the 120 W, 300 W or 500 W kind. These do add up.
@eleitl that’s so expensive. Where do you live?
It’s Germany. Regular rates are some 0.3 EUR/kWh at the moment, I hope to be there by May next year. Meanwhile, I currently make some half of my net power with photovoltaics. It helps to keep the costs down.
oldskool, for something like this you can throw an old nuc on the network
multiple cores is the norm even on budget hardware so a surprising amount of cheap hardware is quite capable.
highly recommend looking into 1L systems. I moved in this direction after realizing i was headed down the same path as you.
Actually, these are mostly dual-socket boxes with lots of cores, ECC RAM and lots of 3.5", 2.5" spindles and SSDs, plus private storage networks, and such.
Instead of a NUC I run a 1U Supermicro 8-core Atom C2758 with 16 GB RAM and SSDs which is quite durable but will die eventually. With more modern hardware I meant something like that, only with onboard 10G and/or 50G (SFP+/SFP28/SFP56) with more and better cores as well as onboard NVMe along with frontal SAS/SATA slots. And of course some larger SSDs to populate these.
Maybe solar can help offsets the power cost? With enough sun and big enough panels, even without batteries you might run your servers for free if your electric company gives you credit for unused solar power during the day.
I’m actually making about 6 kWh/day from photovoltaics since mid-April averaged, which is about half my last year’s total electric energy consumed. I might be able to boost that to 8 kWh/day later this year. This is all while running very little infrastructure, for cost reasons.