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?
It really depends on what you’re doing. In my case the soft costs like domains are pretty negligible compared to how much I seem to spend on more hard disks every six months. You might tell yourself, “96 TB of raw storage will last forever,” but it turns out forever is about a year.
I beg your pardon? 96 terabytes every twelve months?
That’s a slight exaggeration. I think it was about 2 years to get close to filling that up. Keep in mind that a chunk of that is unusable due to drive parity.
Are all of those drives powered up constantly? What’s your power bill like?
If I remember correctly ZFS keeps the whole array running whenever one is active (which is basically always). If I remember, I’ll check my UPS when I get home to see the actual power draw. The storage itself is probably cheaper to run than the main server in the rack - a gen8 HP 360p, which is a bit on the old side and I’d guess not terribly efficient being a 1U piece with many small high-powered fans running constantly.
Electricity here isn’t too expensive though, being public hydro power.
I run a pretty hefty home lab, so my costs are fairly high compared to some.
- Electricity: $70/mo
- Internet: $55/mo (1000x35)
- Cloud backup: $20/mo
- Web firewall/IDS/IPS: $8.30/mo ($99/yr)
- Domain/email: $15/yr
- VPS: $1/mo
Overall: $155/mo
Is the firewall something you’ve needed?
I expose quite a few services to the web, so having that extra layer of protection is nice. And it allows me to control what leaves my network from an application perspective, not just TCP/UDP
What do you use for a web firewall?
ZenArmor. It integrates nicely with Opnsense and offers all of the features that I was looking for.
Impossible to say without providing more details. But somewhere between 10€ and 200€ a month depending on your setup and how you calculate in hardware costs.
200€? 🤯
Well, I am paying less, but if you realistically calculate the costs of hardware over its lifetime, this is certainly not unrealistic for many homelabs.
Realistically thinking, my domain name, email, VPN and IPTV are the only things I’m gonna be paying for in the next few months. If that came to £200 a month, I’d die 😭
Power, Domain Name (if using a standard paid one instead of the cheaper route), VPN are the 3 that I pay for that I feel are the bare minimum.
I pay for a domain that’s $12, but you could easily get the $1 ones for the same purposes. I pay for a static and service VPN with Windscribe, which comes out to be like $35+$89 respectively. So that’s already $136 a year excluding the cost of power. I could cut that cost easily, but I use them for more than just my selfhosting so I feel like it’s a fair price for what I get out of it.
It seems a few people are using them for more than just self-hosting, which is quite cool
