Let's assume I have huge server at home with tons of disks that sucks on average 200W 24/7 - most machines idle around 10-50W depending on the periphials
I'm in Germany, the country with the most expensive electricity prices - I'm paying 31cent/kWh at the moment. That's about the current market price for consumers - so that's 543,48€/year or 45€/month if that machine would suck 200W on average over the year.
If you are lucky have fiber at home - let's say another 50€/month and add 5€ for electricity for fiber and switches and stuff so you pay 100€/month for self-hosting at home.
Using the pricing of the big public clouds like Google, AWS, Azure you can stuff quite a bit of CPU and SSD's and HDD into that machine until you hit the 200W limit.
I just looked at Azure and took the cheapest instances for dev and compared the reserved price for one year (so already discounted)
Azure that gets me a whopping B4s v2 instance with 4 vcores and 16 GiB and no storage and no bandwidth.
Using Hetzner a cheap german dedicated server discounter you can rent a Intel Core i9-13900 with 64GB memory and 2 x 1.92TB SSD for 100€/month.
Realistically you would buy a Beelink SER6 Max Mini-PC, AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS that idles probably around 15W and only pay 40€/year for that. It's 640€ new here and much faster than that Intel machine. You can almost buy two of these and still only pay 105€ a month and in the second year it's only 80€/year.
Of course there is no redudancy, no support, no flexibility your home ISP is probably overbooked and so on and so on - if you just a big machine somehwere that can fail but works most of the time it can be a cheaper alternative.
It's important to note there are extra charges on top of the electricity price that are counted per kwh. Here in Poland we have transmission charges that are almost the same amount as per kwh so the total variable cost is 2x per kwh cost. Looking at my last bill I pay 0.36€ per kwh in Poland despite the chart showing about 0.16€
I wonder if countries like NL listed as one of most expensive have all these charges on top too.
Thanks, I guess I read too much local doom news. I also underestimated that intel box from hetzner - it's actually twice as fast as the small AMD server but I guess the idea was clear.
I am in Czechia, pretty expensive, but I heat with electricity anyway (don't ask).
If you want machine with 8 real CPU cores, 128GB RAM, 8TB SSD storage... It only take 110 Watts under full load. Electricity cost compared to cloud fees is tiny.
