Great reminder of just how expensive of cloud compute cycles are.
Imagine buying a new desktop computer, not the most expensive but a good performing one, and setting it up at home to serve some kind of cloud services. With its cpu fully utilized 24x7, I bet buying equivalent compute at AWS would be crazy expensive per month.
Of course there are many reasons most people don’t use desktop systems as home servers, but I bet there are a few scenarios where it could payoff.
One example might be a bootstrapped startup tight on cash flow, with cpu biased workload, so ISP bandwidth and local disk throughput didn’t bottleneck before the compute did. And it couldn’t be a mission critical service, something where some maintenance windows wouldn’t kill your reputation.
Finally you’d need a way to really minimize admin/devops costs. That kind of work doesn’t take many hours to kill your savings not to mention opportunity costs.
Hetzner basically uses cheap desktop computers as dedicated cloud computing servers. Just keep it backed up. If anything catches on fire, they replace it. Cheap hardware mitigated by excellent customer service. If you can deal with that, the prices are great. I've used them for years for my personal dedicated server, and not had any problems. The current EX41 line starts at 39 EUR / month. You have to buy the "flexi pack" if you want luxury services like extra ip addresses.
An m4.2xlarge on AWS EC2 provides 8 cores and 32 gig of RAM for 40 cents/hour. That'd be $288/month. You could also get an m4.xlarge with 4 cores and 16 gig for $144/month.
Of course, that doesn't include storage and bandwidth.
I mean, sure. I've got a 5 year old laptop that will outperform the t2.micro I'm pay $8.35/month for. But I don't trust my home internet to be stable or fast enough. Not to mention that my primary usage is an IRC bouncer, so I need it to not be on my home internet connection so some script kiddie doesn't DDoS me after I ban them from a channel because they were spamming racial slurs. Yes, that has actually happened.
In the US you can't really get a reliable network connection to your residence. The entire shift towards the cloud is in no small part due to crappy internet. The large ISPs really missed the boat on this.
I average probably a single 5 minute hiccup each month. That's 99.988% uptime. For someone wanting to run their WoW guild's voice chat server, or just a toy server, or a development/staging environment, that's plenty.
But I mean, my home internet is only 35 mbps anyways via Frontier FIOS. I can get 150 mbps through Comcast, but I refuse to give that company a penny of my money. In either case, I'm not going to be running any major production servers at home anyways.
I have Time Warner, and experience about 10-15 minutes of downtime a week on my home wifi and once a year it'll go down for an entire evening. That's annoying, but fine for home wifi and maybe a hobby website, but you couldn't run a company like that.
This is not at all true for me at least. I get very reliable internet, both at home and at my office. At my office I have static IPs and am allowed to host stuff..
Now I would not host my main customer site there. But dev servers? Beta servers? QA servers? Hey why not.. save some massive bills.
Exactly... you won't host a main customer site at home. If ISPs were smarter, they would make this easier for you and provide the tools to make it extremely easy. ISPs could have been AWS or Azure, instead they preferred to be a flaky bundle of wires.
Imagine buying a new desktop computer, not the most expensive but a good performing one, and setting it up at home to serve some kind of cloud services. With its cpu fully utilized 24x7, I bet buying equivalent compute at AWS would be crazy expensive per month.
Of course there are many reasons most people don’t use desktop systems as home servers, but I bet there are a few scenarios where it could payoff.
One example might be a bootstrapped startup tight on cash flow, with cpu biased workload, so ISP bandwidth and local disk throughput didn’t bottleneck before the compute did. And it couldn’t be a mission critical service, something where some maintenance windows wouldn’t kill your reputation.
Finally you’d need a way to really minimize admin/devops costs. That kind of work doesn’t take many hours to kill your savings not to mention opportunity costs.