Comment by KronisLV

3 years ago

Currently using two old computers as servers in my homelab: 200 GE Athlons with 35 W TDP, ~20 GB of value RAM (can't afford ECC), a few 1TB HDDs. As CI servers and test nodes for running containers, they're pretty great, as well as nodes for pulling backups from any remote servers (apart from the ECC aspect), or even something to double as a NAS (on separate drives).

I actually did some quick maths and it would appear that a similar setup on AWS would cost over 600$ per month, Azure, GCP and others also being similarly expensive, which I just couldn't afford.

Currently running a few smaller VPSes on Time4VPS as well (though Hetzner is also great), for the stuff that needs better availability and better networking. Would I want everything on a single server? Probably not, because that would mean needing something a bit better than a homelab setup behind a residential Internet connection (even if parts of it can be exposed to the Internet through a cheap VPS as a proxy, a la Cloudflare).