I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.

Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?

  • @renzevEnglish
    1•5 months ago

    For a while I had a low-power server for my personal things that stayed on all the time, and a more powerful computer that hosted a minecraft server. As the player count dwindled, I decided to make the minecraft server automatically shut down at midnight, and wake up at 8 in the morning using rtcwake. And eventually I disabled the rtcwake thing entirely, and made the smaller server run a webui that could wake up the minecraft server using wake-on-lan. So if anyone wanted to play, they would first have to remotely turn on the server through a web page. This was all password-protected ofcourse.

    Also, no, I don’t use a UPS. I’ve never seen anyone use a UPS in the country where I live, and I don’t think I’ve experienced a power outtage in like 4 years. Whether or not you need a UPS seems to be largely dependent on where you live.