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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 17:35

I should just go back to paying a server provider to host my stuff. Thought I would be saving money but omg power and failing hardware is expensive

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 17:39

@snow i mean if you buy dell enterprise hardware with enterprise parts sure, nothing really wrong with running a webserver on a second hand NUC or one of those small office PCs. Though while you're using enterprise hardware you could consider buying ECC dimms second hand, they'll let you know when they're broken anyway, only issue is dell might reject the parts because dell is like the apple of enterprise servers @@ would have to look up to make sure the parts work for your machine

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 17:44

@anthropy I have a dell R620. DIM A1 failed and DIM B4 is failing. Power was already 120 but after using the server it jumped to 190. I don't get how running a server can raise the power bill by 70 bucks. At this rate I should just rent a server I'll get like 4 times the storage and better CPU than what I already have and it would be cheaper because I won't have to pay for hardware replacements

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 17:51

@snow oh yea, I mean power kinda depends but yea it isn't cheap for bigger servers, running e.g 500w for 24h is 12kwh, times 30 is almost half a megawatt-hour a month, which can definitely be pricey. That's another reason an enterprise server is kind of not practical at home, whereas if you'd e.g use a NUC, you'd be closer to like 10-50w at most, which is 10-50x cheaper. (1-7$ a month), with those enterprise servers usually the fans alone already use 10-30w each ^^;

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 17:55

@anthropy That's the thing though I have a lot of stuff running so it's hard for me to get a tiny little computer that cannot have a decent ram upgrades

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 17:59

@snow I mean a reasonably modern (or honestly even older) NUC will happily take 64gb+ RAM, you just need to find some 32GB SODIMMs but that's not super expensive especially comparing to ECC enterprise dell RAM, my laptop has 64gb too and iirc it cost like 150€ at the time.

Or you get those office small formfactor PCs, those usually take 2 normal DDR4 sticks and that's even cheaper

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Written by Odoben on 2025-01-13 at 17:55

@anthropy @snow I second the NUC method. Or even better, a bunch of (maybe even cluster of) low-power boards with no moving parts :dragn_thinkhappy:

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 17:56

@odoben @anthropy Well I'm thinking of getting a raspberry pie since they're doing 16 gig models now

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Written by Odoben on 2025-01-13 at 17:58

@snow @anthropy I haven't tried going the ARM route yet so I have no idea how good software support is. But one thing I can say is I absolutely adore low-power ITX boards. Some even come with DC power jacks so they're almost like SBCs but with swappable memory:

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/

If I didn't want my NAS to be upgradable to fill all 5 HDD slots then I'd probably have chosen this board.

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 18:02

@odoben @snow also a good option, but let me try find some examples of second hand small formfactor dell optiplex or hp whatever, let me get to my desk first

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Written by Odoben on 2025-01-13 at 18:03

@anthropy @snow Don't those use very specific kinds of fans that are prone to failing? :blobfoxmelt:

Source: experience with my NUC

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 18:04

@odoben @anthropy Yeah I've tried using Dell optiplexes before and I refuse to use them because it kept complaining about the rear exhaust fan and every time I restarted it it would make me go to the keyboard to bypass it

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 18:12

@snow @odoben hmm, haven't had that problem myself before, mostly with laptops, though you could always go jank mode and open it up and just connect a normal desktop fan to it instead :P

but even if we're talking slightly bigger second hand office desktops you'd still usually find amazing deals for like 70$, with normal off the shelf fans you could replace for 5$

here for example, assuming USA: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=office+pc&_sacat=0

they'd be easy to upgrade too, and power usage would still be like 20-70w

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 18:19

@snow @odoben though I'd of course, regardless of purchase, first investigate what the reviews are for a specific mini tower office PC and if it has any weird quirks.

That low power board from before should also be a fine option, although then you're limited to a single dimm slot.

Personally, my home setup consists of a Ryzen 3600 with a fairly standard B450 mobo, those are also not super expensive and in my specific case I'm using around 50-80w, still about 1/10th of the dell server I guess.

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 18:22

@anthropy @odoben For now I think I'm just gonna go the renting route so I can slowly rebuild my home lab. The best route for me I think would be just building the PCs I'm gonna as servers

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 18:24

@snow @odoben I suppose it's never a truly terrible option, especially since you can quit any time. I am also renting a fairly big hetzner server, mainly because I'm still waiting for the fiber to the home I was promised 3 years ago and my upload is like 120mbit at best, so I'm mostly just keeping my offsite backups at home and doing any heavy lifting that doesn't require bandwidth using my local machinery.

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Written by Snow on 2025-01-13 at 18:26

@anthropy @odoben Honestly I would kill for a upload speed better than 20MB. Supposedly there's fiber coming to my area soon but that's what they've been saying every year I just wish Comcast didn't have a monopoly with my landlord

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 17:59

@snow @odoben I wouldn't use a raspi, if you run any remotely heavy workload you'll find that ARM really isn't all that powerful, even though sure it only uses like 5 watts at most

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Written by Odoben on 2025-01-13 at 18:00

@anthropy @snow the only thing of mine that runs on ARM is my website on Ampere from Hetzner and that's only because I was like 'why not, why couldn't I choose ARM"

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Written by Anthropy :verified_dragon: on 2025-01-13 at 18:04

@odoben @snow yea my status website does too, though my main hetzner server is running a 12 thread xeon and that thing is usually running with a load of 2-5+ so I don't think ARM would be a good idea if you intend to run something like a mastodon + nextcloud + some other things and maybe a gameserver (gameservers are especially heavy AND the latency is heavily tied to how loaded up the CPU is too)

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