A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
Mine is roughly 300 watts, much of which is from using an old computer as a NAS separate from my server server.
However, I put the whole thing in the basement next to my heat pump water heater which sucks the heat out of the air and puts it into my water, so I am ameliorating the expense by at least recapturing some of the *waste heat.
370W average.
3 x Lenovo x3650 M5 (Proxmox Nodes)
TP Link TL-SG3428X switch
Raspberry Pi 3B+ (physical Pi-hole server)
Generic Mini PC Intel N3150 (OpenVPN client)
Dell Optiplex (OPNSense firewall)
Is that 370watt across all of them or per fat server? I ask because three m5 sound like a lot of power drain!.
And thanks for sharing!
That's for everything listed above. This is measured straight from my UPS which everything is connected to.
AMD Ryzen 5600G
B550 Aorus Master
2x16 Ripjaw V 3200mhz
1x 14 TB Toshiba N300 for media
1x 6TB Seagate Ironwolf for backup important data
1x 500GB Samsung evo 970 as systemdrive
1x 500GB Crucial P1 as cache and download
1x 2TB Crucial P3 for docker, apps, databases, incus
Bequiet 400W
Nvidia GTX 1660 Super
Idle power 53w, totally worth it ☺️ The extra graphic card is for Immich and Ollama / overall transcoding.
I currently have probably 10% of your performance at 2x the power draw. 😭
😳😳😳
Get new hardware or you will pay it with your energy bill
Lol, I've been paying for years! (It's been about $1/day).
I'm working on it. Have a new NAS box I'm currently setting up - it's max output power is 180w, I should know later today what my idle power is like.
And then... I get to restructure all our data stores, backup processes, etc. Oh fun.
~600W. 2 machines: Dell 730 8 disks running multiple Minecraft servers. Supermicro 16 disks in raid 10 running multiple VM for various functions. All on a 6kva ups (overkill I know)
Luckily I have a large solar array.
My R710 is begging to be replaced.
Good timing for this thread. I just finished consolidating 2 computers worth of fun into 1 newer computer that can do it all. I sold my wife on the idea with electricity as the reasoning.
In the end, it uses 30 watts less, which is not as much as I had hoped. That's about $5 a month.
180 watts with an i5-13400, 9 spinning disks, 1 M.2 SSD, no extra GPU, 24 port switch (powers 3 AP's), modem, Mikrotik router, and a large UPS. I wonder if the UPS uses any power as a trickle charge for the batteries.
Ok, so most of you also use normal PC processors for your setups. So my power usage is not that high in comparison.
But still, a RaspberryPI would use much less and would still be performant enough.
5W vs 50W is an annual difference of 400 kWh. Or 150 kG CO2e, if that's your metric. Either way, it's not a huge cost for most people capable of running a 24/7 home lab.
If you start thinking about the costs - either cash or ghg - of creating an RPi or other dedicated low power server; the energy to run HDDs, at 5-10W each, or other accessories, well, the picture gets pretty complicated. Power is one aspect, and it's really easy to measure objectively, but that also makes it easy to fetishize.
At $0.13/kwh 100 watts 24/7/365 will cost you $113.88 a year, or roughly $10 a month. Little things add up.
As soon as you have a requirement for large reliable storage then you're on to at least the small desktop arena with a few HDD at which point it's more efficient to just have the small pc and ditch the RPI.
Mine is around 10W average.
It runs:
And a few other things.
My current setup uses ~180W, which is a lot, but WAY better than my previous one, which was ~600W. Power is cheap where I live, so I'm not too worried about it.
180W homelab:
600W homelab:
~53 W
Server:
Mini PC: Beelink S12 N95
8 port unmanaged TP Link switch
I would like to expand my storage, however I don't have any available SATA ports and I believe adding an HBA would increase the idle draw about 8 W. I might just upgrade the SSDs and split the storage between the HDDs and SSDs.
Probably about a kilowatt.
About 500W. 1 self build server 1 Dell R510 and one dell R710. This also includes a bit of network gear like a 48 port switch.
6w or so in idle, 50w under load with HDDs and RPi combined
I use an Intel SBC with 10W TDP CPU in it. With a HDD and after PSU inefficiency, it draws about 10-20W depending on the load.
That's impressive.
What do you use the system for? And services like PiHole or media server?
That’s impressive.
Yeah, you really don't need a lot of CPU power for selfhosting.
It's a J4105, forgot to mention that.
What do you use the system for? And services like PiHole or media server?
Oh, sorry, forgot to add that bit.
It's mainly a NAS housing my git-annex repos that I access via SSH.
I also host a few HTTP services on it:
The services I use most here are Paperless and Piped.
Mealie will be added to that list as soon as the upstream PR lands which might be later this evening.
My Immich module is almost ready to go but the Immich app has a major bug preventing me from using it properly, so that's on hold for now.
I do want to set up Jellyfin in the not too distant future. The machine should handle that just fine with its iGPU as Intel's Quicksync is quite good and I probably won't even need transcoding for most cases either.
I probably won't be able to get around setting up Nextcloud for much longer. I haven't looked into it much but I already know it's a beast. What I primarily want from it is calendar and contact synchronisation but I'd also like to have the ability to share files or documents with mere mortals such as my SO or family.
The NixOS module hopefully abstracts away most of the complexity here but still...
Makes sense that basic file hosting shouldn't use much power.
Sharing stuff with friends and family is in my plan, eventually, not sure what approach to take yet, but I'd like to avoid an app for them, if I can (people are resistant to apps, I kind of get it).
I've looked at Nextcloud/Owncloud a few times, and it always seems like a lot more than I need, though I also want to move my calendar, contacts, etc, to my own hosting. Not sure what the right answer is, lol.
My setup already goes quite a bit beyond basic file hosting.
There is no self hosted service I could imagine to need that I'd expect not to be able to host due to CPU constraints. I think I'll run into RAM constraints first; it's already at 3GiB after boot.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| AP | WiFi Access Point |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| Git | Popular version control system, primarily for code |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NUC | Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| PSU | Power Supply Unit |
| PiHole | Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) |
| Plex | Brand of media server package |
| PoE | Power over Ethernet |
| RPi | Raspberry Pi brand of SBC |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
| SBC | Single-Board Computer |
| SSD | Solid State Drive mass storage |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
16 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #545 for this sub, first seen 26th Feb 2024, 15:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Don’t have anything spectacular performance wise but my late 2012 i7 Mac Mini Server is reporting ~14w (with my services running and downloads happening) and I saw bursts up to 30w. Not too bad for 12yo Mac running Homebridge, 2 Navidrome instances, Jellyfin, nginx, Transmission, and SMB (looking into Nextcloud to replace that).
~25W which consists of:
I've been thinking about upgrading because the CPU isn't that fast, the RAM ain't that much and I want to add a few more HDD's. I've seen a pretty interesting Lenovo P520 with 64GB RAM a CPU that's 3x times as fast and room for 6 HDD's for €350, but the power consumption I can see online (80W) isn't that appealing with European electricity prices.
Average load for me is about 750W. I run my desktop from one of the UPS units in my rack, so when that's on it sits around 1.1kW.
The 750W load is across 4 rack servers(1 is the NAS with 12 disks) and 3 switches.
120w continuous. Working on bringing it down, because that's $1/day.
I'd rather spend that money on new hardware every year.
35W
DIY PC with 2 SSD and 1 HDD (it used to be 22W with 3 SSDs and no HDD)
Hosting arr stack, nextcloud, immich and many more (~40 services in total)
0.12kWh / h normally (120W). I'm also running 6 HDDs in raid10 so the spin down time is not optimal.
That’s energy, not power. If that’s the energy consumption per hour, then that’s 120W, which is high but not outrageous with a full size computer with 6 disks.
Correct. I assumed a normalized kWh rating would be better than any instantaneous measurement I had on hand.
~120W with an old server motherboard and 6 spinning drives (42TB of storage overall).
Currently running Nextcloud, Home Assistant, Gitea, Matrix, Jellyfin, Lemmy, Mastodon, Vaultwarden, and a bunch of other smaller stuff alongside storing a few months worth of surveillance footage, so ~$12/month in power certainly ain't a bad deal versus paying for hosted versions of even a fraction of those services.
I have looked at the ROI for getting more efficient kit and ended up discovering that going for something like a low-idle-power-draw system like a NUC or thin client and a disk enclosure has a return period on the order of multiple years.
Based on that information, I've instead put that money towards lower hanging fruit in the form of upgrading older inefficient appliances and adding multi-zone temperature control for power savings.
The energy savings I've been able to make based on long-term energy use data collected via Home Assistant has more than offset all of the electricity I've ever used to power the system itself.
About 150w total, trying to bring it down since electricity here is pretty expensive.
4 machines: two 4th gen i5, one 6th gen Nuc (Have two more but not set them up yet), and one HP thin client. Also two UPSes, and 3 cameras (previously four, but one was accidentally damaged).
Hosting Home Assistant, Zabbix, Palworld, SMB, Transmission, Plex and a bunch of other misc stuff.
Kind of contemplating moving everything to a 10th gen Nuc, but thinking a Ryzen based mini pc might be a better option
Depends where you draw the line of the home lab. I'm drawing 160W at the moment, but that includes a dedicated CCTV PC (running Proxmox in a cluster) and POE switch. The CCTV I don't consider part of the home lab really, the alternative would be an off the shelf box and no one would consider that.
The 160W also includes a 24 port switch (I'm only using 8) and the FTTP power, plus the rake from the UPS. So probably total the actual homelab server would be about 80-100, I guess. But even then it runs my router using opnsense, so I don't have a separate router box to power. It also serves as my "cloud" storage, so I'm not saving watts, but I'm saving the cost there.
I could get the power down quite a bit by changing the 6 HDD for 2 mirrored HDD, but the cost of large enough disks means it'd be years before it paid for itself, so I'm sticking with 6 small disks for now.
I've thought about trimming things down and going lower powered, but it all comes back to storage and needing the large storage online all the time.
Plus I consider a 100W a big saving when before I ran a dual Xeon Dell R710 which used around 225W under the same workload.