Home Server Or VPS? One Family's Math 380
toygeek writes "Which is cheaper: Running a server from home, or renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server)? We're trying to pinch pennies where we can, and my son Derrick suggested upgrading an extra PC we have and running his Minecraft server at home. Would it save enough money to be worth it? I wanted to share the results of my analysis with my Slashdot brethren." The upshot in this case? "Overall it is VERY cost effective for us to run the home server."
Uh.. bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
The word doesn’t even appear in the article... yet it’s probably the biggest consideration when looking at a server, be it local, shared/vps, or dedicated.
Hardware and even power are cheap by comparison. It’s definitely gonna be the limiting factor of what you can do with a home server (especially a decently sized minecraft server or one that uses a lot of mods..). If you can get a home fibre connection you might be ok, but reading the article, this guy is probably on dialup.. so good luck with that!
Only Minecraft? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Uh.. bandwidth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh... backups? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lifecycle costs (Score:4, Insightful)
The comparison isn't quite valid. You are looking at short term costs, but you neglect the long term costs. A business will factor in things like what it will cost to replace the VPS every 3 years. If your system isn't up to snuff in a year or two, have you put enough aside to replace it? Lets say a new system will cost you $450. That means you need to add $150 per year to factor that in. As some others have said, you ignore the network costs. There is a cost (maybe to you it is intangible) for using your home network. You can say it doesn't cost, but the cost is not $0. Maybe 10% is a better number. Anyways, these are the kinds of things that commercial companies grapple with in the pricing models.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
DOS protection, Infra redundancy, Security (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:TCO fail (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope this guy is not anyone's CPA or handles and sort of financial analysis/projections at his work.
The most likely indication that he is in financial management, is you figure out the aggregate total sum of his, PLUS all involved /.ers hourly rate, and the cost of debating this probably has at least 3 or 4 more zeros than the expense involved. Penny wise and pound foolish and all that.
Everyone at work has had the experience of a two hour meeting with 15 devs at $100/hr to debate exactly how in painful detail the group will pay roughly $5/month for coffee, and whoever saves the most pennies (at a mere cost of $3000 labor) will get some kind of BS award on their annual review. Why if we save 30 cents a year, at a cost of $3000 we'll be rollin in the profits by 1st quarter 12013... of course a real NPV calc based on real rates would make it pretty hard to ever profit off an annual return of 30 cents on a 3000 dollar investment...
The only thing the dude needs to do is:
1) Is it possible? Yes, obviously
2) Is its cost in line for a hobby expense? Yes, its cheaper than golf or watching cable TV or pretty much anything other than watching paint dry. Heck, even then you'd have to buy paint and paint ain't cheap.
3) Is it fun? Well, its probably more fun to host at home, than pay an intermediary to do it for you. Much like its a hell of a lot more fun to cook than order delivery.
So yeah .. just do it.
Re:Uh.. bandwidth? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, but this article was all about budgeting, and bandwidth wasn't even mentioned. To use a car-ish analogy, it would be like debating between a car and a truck without considering the different in fuel usage..
Not saying what he wants to do is impractical, but "will my home ISP connection provide me enough pipe to do what I need to do" would be top of my list of stuff to think about... way before how much electricity will the thing use.
Re:Free Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Anybody paying any serious money for computer equipment in this day and age is just throwing away money. I run my house and my medium sized business all on thrift store or refurbished computers. I've never paid more than $50 for a desktop, $300 for a blade server (a nice Dell one with redundant power, redundant Ethernet, hardware RAID, and all of that good stuff), or $400 for a laptop (currently, running an i5 with a 17" screen and a TB HD). Buying new computer hardware is a much worse investment than buying even a new car.
With that being said, to people who buy new computer equipment: THANK YOU!
Re:Can you replace your whole system for that pric (Score:2, Insightful)
>You are also ignoring the value of your time
Whenever I see that argument put forward, I can't help but think how lame it is since by that logic we should not do anything ourselves. We should not shop for our own food, clean our clothes or home, put gas in the card, or god forbid wash the darn thing.
Re:Here's a benchmark (Score:4, Insightful)
Having an 800W PSU in your server does not mean that the server draws 800W. Mine doesn't draw anywhere near that much. Admittedly, my server isn't doing minecraft or any game server, but it is running FTP/HTTP, and e-mail, and using server-side heuristic analysis on spam rather than RBL's, so the load on it is non-zero.
Re:ISP Terms of service (Score:4, Insightful)
With all of the peering agreements they have set up, they really don't pay either direction most of the time. They fake a shortage of resources to keep costs high.
With most ISP's, that term is in there only as a reason to terminate you when they want to. They don't usually port scan or actively try to find servers.
Re:Free Hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
They said "compared to most of the European countries that have sane power generation policies." Britain does not have sane power generation policies, and will probably be joining the third world in a couple of years when they have to start shutting down old power stations without having built any new ones to replace them.
Re:Can you replace your whole system for that pric (Score:5, Insightful)
If the dad has to put time into this then you need to estimate what his time is worth - in particular the opportunity cost of him not being available to do other fatherly stuff.
If he's doing much of his work with his son, then he's getting a good return on time spent.