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What cloud vps server host do I use?
(lemmy.ml)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
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Well, how long do you expect the cluster to last, and how much did it cost? We need to factor that in to understand the true monthly cost of the cluster.
I expect it to last for over 10years.
It has been running for 2 so far.
The total material cost was somewhere between 800 and 1000€.
For comparison, here is an ARM vps https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/arm-server/ if you scroll down a bit and add 8TB block storage to it you can see that the storage alone would cost just shy of 100€ per month. That would rake up the same bill in less than a year.
Okay, so €1000 over 120 months, that's another €8.34/month, plus the €15/month in electricity costs. A total of €23.34/month.
So yeah, you're not going to get those specs at that price on a VPS today, but there are a lot of caveats here.
At least with a VPS you can rent only what you need when you need it, have a dedicated multi-gigabit network connection, and watch server specs increase and costs decrease as scalable hardware capacity improves over time, all while keeping your home network safely out of the picture.
all good points to consider for sure.
I won't go into all of them, but to summarize, it works perfectly for me.
The cool thing about a cluster is the upgrade path. It started with just two blades, but as I ran more docker containers and went out of resources, I just bought more. Am now up to 6 and there are still 2 free slots if I need it.
Storage I definitely overprovisioned but it will get used up eventually, that one is a bit more tricky to smoothly upgrade. Each blade has one nvme slot, but for bulk storage I have external raid enclosures, which is somewhat awkward.
Like you implied, it all depends on your need. If all you need is to run some private services, as OP is asking about, a bunch of SBCs or an old second hand office computer will do just fine and be very nicely priced compared to renting a similarly specced VPS.