Fine. Don’t do it to save money. Do it because we are sick and tired of outsourcing everything to a damn subscription and owning and controlling nothing in our lives anymore.
I’ve actually start branching out now since i have a reliable stack. Docker apps are great and fun to configure (less than have the time). So many things I can do with a computer. I found Stash last month and its been crazy how it improved my workflow
This is true, self hosting doesn’t save you money. It is, in fact, more expensive and costs your time.
This is because modern technology isn’t sold to you as a product, it’s sold to you as a loss leader so that you use their products and let them spy on you so that they can sell that data to advertisers or anybody who can complete an ACH transfer.
Your options are
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Use commercial services and sell your privacy in exchange for cheap consumer electronics which will be obsolete next year either by design or through engineered hardware failure.
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Setup the services on your own devices and pay the cost in hardware and free time.
In one scenario you spend a bit more money, in the other scenario you don’t have privacy. Everyone gets to choose which is more important.
I dont know that they are loss leaders, apple, google and samsung have €2k+ phones. But yeah its about data, control being sold as convenience.
I miss settings menus in everything.
At the top end, they’re probably not subsidized… but if you’re getting by on a $100 phone, it’s likely a $100 piece of spyware that sold your data to pay for 2/3rds of your phone.
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Huh?! My server and a 8tb external hdd costed me 40k inr (bought 1.5 years ago). It consumes less than 200-300inr worth of electricity per month. With that I am self-hosting Immich, Jellyfin, Paperless-ngx, Vaultwarden (Used by 7-8 users with family organisation), Firefly-iii, linkwarden, a central syncthing nodes which is synced with my client devices, media tracker, arr stack with qbittorrent. With a Proton VPN subscription of 7.5k inr/year and backblaze for cloud backs about 150inr per month, it costs me just ~10k (~100usd) a year in runnings costs for subscriptions worth of 50-60k a year. With those savings I can literally buy a really good Moped every 2-3 years. Granted my nvme in the server is due replacement in a year because it is a lower quality one and has already worn out by 40%. But it definitely saves a ton of money when you have cheap electricity.
I’ve never heard of anyone approaching the topic to save money. It’s either privacy/ownership or just goofing around with old hardware
So where can I put 130TB of files for less than $10/TB (what I paid for my HDDs) plus about 50¢ per day in electricity?
On backblaze I’d be spending $910… PER MONTH and I wouldn’t even have unlimited access to my files.
This has to be rage bait.
I don’t think beginners are going to be in that situation and most people probably won’t ever be in your situation, mostly people doing it as a hobby are going to end up with 100+ TB of data.
EDIT: when I say “most people wouldn’t be in that situation” I was thinking of the typical person who is on the fence about this and would be swayed by the “it will save you money” argument. Its quite likely that most people currently self hosting (I’d imagine mostly hobbyists) could be in a similar situation to you if they aren’t already
What a stupid article.
For real, this almost turned into one of those sarcastic “You better not self-host unless you are some goober that loves privacy, because it’ll take up so much of your time enjoying all the things you self-host!” articles. But committed to just this one guy’s experience with no limits and paying for things as a solution.
I self-host on a laptop I was about to get rid of. It costs nothing. I bought an external HD for immich, which I needed anyway.
Yeah idk my power bill hasn’t gone up and I have 0 subscriptions for TV and photo backup so yeah this article is clearly bs
Im not even going to bother clicking this piece of shit article, thats bullshit fuelled by big money, an insignificant piece of opinion for low IQ victims.
For me it’s about ownership and control. The things I really need (mail server, webserver for my own purposes) can really run on a raspberry pi. Done that for years.
Today it’s proxmox on a lenovo thinkcenter M710. One VM internet facing, one VM internal only (like home automation, nagios4 core, syslog to psql + grafana) way cheaper than a vps in the cloud.
I’d like to know which non self-hosted service they’re recommending that can serve files to my classic Mac collection for less than my $200 mini pc.
Or which VPS they recommend that would have taught my kids how to set up services and repair/select hardware.
Unless you’re purely a technology consumer, starting off with self-hosting is the only way to learn all the skills you need to determine what needs to be self-hosted, what needs a VPS, and what needs to sit on someone else’s technology stack.
Realistically, self-hosting has cost me around $150/year for the past 20 years. But that money has provided services and experience that either isn’t available or is MUCH more expensive to do any other way.
Generally the costs in self hosting are in paying for lessons learned as you make mistakes and have to pivot (hardware selection, software gaffes, etc.) and time. But those are costs that are easily recouped through personal development over time.
Speaking of data storage, I’d be happy with tape backups. How did that become unaffordable technology?
That if is quite significant, as everything that follows is meaningless, as far as I’m concerned. Hilarious, considering that no one with the skills and intentions, will ever be moved by what was given as supposedly good and valid reasons not to self host. To rephrase, the author stated, if you care for sugar, don’t eat the lettuce.
