Who ever said this was about money?!
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.
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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Whoever thinks self-hosting is about saving money has grossly misunderstood technology…and people, for that matter.
Self-hosting will not give your mouth sex appeal
Self-hosting will not get rid of the nubs
Self-hosting will not make you look five pounds thinner
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
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.
Exactly — money is not the only cost nor benefit. It’s fun, it gives me control, it’s not going to get acquired and trashed, etc.
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
Sounds like something a hosting service would say.
I’ve never heard of anyone approaching the topic to save money. It’s either privacy/ownership or just goofing around with old hardware
It’s going take me roughly 8 months to break even on the savings from subscription.
Assuming I value my time at -10 dollars a month…
I mean, saving subscription costs is one draw for me personally, but at that point it’s a matter of making up my hardware investment cost versus the subscription costs over time. This isn’t an instant money saver, and it never was.
also:
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I hate jumping around between apps to figure out what i want to watch.
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media consolidation is a shitshow and I refuse to give any more money to the industry, especially regressive propaganda machine Fox Corp.
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Also if all of the hardware is recycled that seems like an easy way to avoid paying anything at all
I think your discounting the amount I save on my heating bill.
Yeah…um…no? I run a dozen different services on a $200 mini pc without issue.
Yeah same, I would like to know what are the 40+ services the writer is using.
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My Server idles at 80w 😭 But at least I’m in control and it’s so fun and interesting
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
Well I definitely save atleast $100 a month by self hosting and not subbing to streaming services.
Haha, thank GOD it’s not about saving money!
It’s the principal of the matter. Plus, my data, my decisions, my control & ability to easily manage, my privacy, my ability to swap platforms, my managing costs without surprise subscription increases or ToS I won’t read, and my learning of new systems, software, code, etc. OH and my ability to say FUCK YOU to big tech.
There’s way more benefit than convenience of “cloud”.
