I know it’s a rude question, but it’s been on my mind… I’m wondering roughly what I should be expecting to outlay when I finish my set-up? So I’m assuming it includes things like domain names, hosting for backups, email providers, VPN, etc. What’s a good budget to set?

  • DontTakeMySky
    6•6 months ago

    I largely run raspberry pis so my electric costs are likely minimal (I’ve never calculated it). Besides that:

    • PIA VPN: ~$4/mo

    • Digital Ocean Droplet + Backup snapshots: $7/mo

    • Domains: ~$25/year

    • Backblaze B2 backups: $7/mo

      • @[email protected]
        6•6 months ago

        Self hosting is actually crazy cheap compared to any kind of corporate solution. Anybody paying for SquareSpace, for instance, could cut their cost by a factor of 20 or more with a FOSS alternative like Ghost Blog.

        I know my setup is over engineered a little so I pay a bit more, but my expenses are still under $100 per year for subscription services that support the self hosting.

        $2.50 per month for a VPN.

        $40 per year for two VPS’s (this is what I know I overpay for since I didn’t really know how much I needed when I set it up, but the time to change it is worth more to me than the extra $10 per year).

        $17ish per year for a domain name.

        Plex lifetime pass (around $100 one time).

        And of course, ten million dollars in man hours spent learning how to use Linux.

        • @[email protected]OP
          2•6 months ago

          Those man hours rack up, but I bet you still feel exhilarated when you get something working or fix something.

          • @[email protected]
            6•6 months ago

            My wife says she wishes she could make me scream like Linux does. I told her she would if I could put it in her bash.

            She leaves me alone when I’m on the computer now. It’s quiet in here.

      • DontTakeMySky
        2•6 months ago

        It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

        And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

        And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.