Self-hosting apps / homelab
Getting used enterprise gear is not prohibitively expensive, but the electric bills balloon very quickly.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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I currently bought an old desktop from a friend that I use as my Homeserver.
- I bought 3 HDDs for storage
- I rent a VPS
- I rented Proton to host mail for my domain, but switched to netcup groupware because that sucked.
- Some domains
- Electricity
Wow I thought it was way more.
One time costs: ~500β¬ Monthly costs: ~15β¬ Plus electricity, but I have solar. I assume it's about 150β¬/year
But I'm a cheap selfhosted, but eventually, I will have a huge ass Enterprise Level Rack in my basement.
We need a r/homeDatacenter on lemmy!
Would be cool if we found some kind of use for the community of people that likes to host network infrastructure. We could be a cdn or share compute, with the power of the federation!
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Knitting. Super cheap to start, you can pick up a set of needles and some acrylic yarn for under $20. But when you start getting into nice yarns and bigger pieces, you are spending hundreds of dollars on yarn alone for a blanket or a sweater. And you want nice needles in all sizes as well as all types (double pointed, regular and circular)β¦ more hundreds of dollars.
Moral of the story is if a friend knits you something with nice yarn, please appreciate it. Lots of effort and thought went into it.
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This is not the first post where I feel it but I love it so much that we have a lot of people on Lemmy that can talk about things not related to computers!
Surprised thereβs no reef tank people here. Imagine spending $5000 on a 20 gallon fish tank - BEFORE spending any money on corals.
Ya it CAN be done for $50, but nobody does that.
Gardening.
Containers are surprisingly expensive. And you need a lot of soil to fill them, which gets expensive too. Then it's impossible to only buy the seeds you need, when there are so many cool varieties...
Board games. Things get expensive once you start collecting
Mechanical keyboards. The next one is my endgame, I swear. Just one more groupbuy for those keycaps. It never truly ends.
I never got the appeal of mechanical keyboards. If you actually have to type all day, a proper flat keyboard like in the old MacBooks ('09-ish) is way nicer and costs much less.
And then it turns out some horrendously ugly piece of plastic (like the Kinesis Advantage 360) is better for actually using.
Electronics / microcontrollers.
Took just a few months to go from, "I can make a wifi connected weather station for like $20 in components!?" to "oscilloscopes cost how much?"
Has there already grown a noteworthy Arduino/ESP Community on Lemmy?
I'm really happy I don't have enough space for that stuff. Otherwise I would be poor. It's hard enough to keep myself from buying another old computer.
Watercolor.
Children play with $5 palettes. Apparently I pay $20 for a single color tube.
Tinkering with electronics. Like, breadboards, integrated circuits, transistors, microcontrollers.
I've got a tacklebox full to bursting with components and parts worth probably close to a grand.
I needed a new saucepan.
I've now replaced half my kitchen.
Coffee. I'm in a coffee producing country. It could be as cheap as grabbing a bag from the coffee institute (really good and cheap), a cloth filter and call it a day. Instead, I'm on my second espresso machine, fourth grinder, second portafilter set, and have all the doodads to make it just how I like it.
Growing cannabis (legal here in Canada)
β¦anyone can grow weed. Growing GOOD weed is an art.
I unintentionally grow weed because I made some tincture for grandma.
Now it just grows on my garden and I can't get rid of it.
2000 into my fully automated hydroponic weed factory. Another 500 to make my nutrient solutions from scratch. Mind you that 500 dollars when making from scratch likely last 20 years of crops. It does make a good 1.5 pounds of dry weed every 3 to 4 months with the for legal plants allowed in Canada. I barely smoke so give nearly all away.
Three year prior, harvested a crop down right before going to Mexico for three month trip. Was still some shoots barely growing so for shits and giggles I turn the lights back to 22 hours per day to see if they would go back to the veg state. Have camera so can watch it remotely. Shit starts fully growing like a new plant. Anyhow COVID puts a wrinkle in my return. Ended up in Mexico for 18 months. Over that time, thing kept growing like nuts. Automation on water replacement and nutrient injection along with pH monitoring. Became sort of a how long can this thing go with near zero human intervention. Had only to send my brother in law in three times to cut it down and refill my nutrient injectors from solutions I made before leaving.
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I bought myself a raspberry pi for my birthday a few years ago.
I now have thousands of dollars in hardware sitting in a server rack in my office. Whoops.
Coffee.
I blame James Hoffman entirely.
Within a year I went from:
Drinking instant coffee at home, but really enjoying "proper coffee"
To
Buying a cafetiere (~Β£15) + preground coffee
To
Buying a Nespresso (~Β£60 on offer) + pods
To
Buying a budget espresso machine (~Β£120) + preground coffee
To
Wasting my money on a cheap manual coffee grinder (~Β£50) + beans
To
Immediately replacing it with an entry level Sage grinder (~Β£170)
To
Buying an entry Level "proper" espresso machine (~Β£700)
It took me a good 2-3 weeks of practicing and dialling in before pulling a good shot of coffee that I'd actually want to drink, but by that point it was also about learning a new skill, learning how different aspects of the process affect the end result and learning how to make all sorts of different espresso-based drinks.
My girlfriend thought I was nuts at first, but a year or so later even she agrees it was worth the investment. I still for the life of me can't get the hang of latte art though.
The problem is now though that I'm a waaaay more critical of coffee from coffee shops, because I spent a long time making bad coffee whilst learning!
For me it is maybe camping.
I just tested my new sleeping bag - under 0.5kg rated to -5Β°C. And realised that I bought/ replaced lots of gear to higher quality gear over few years.
3D printing. Purchased a cheap 3D printer to save money printing things instead of buying things. 5 printer print farm later, no idea why I'm doing this to myself.
Running.
Was supposed to be the cheapest way to get exercise. You can do it right from your front door, no gym subscriptions, no specialized equipment (some people will tell you you don't even need shoes), and it's far and away the best time-value exercise I've ever found. You can get away with like 20 minutes 3-4 times a week and be doing great.
Well, turns out I love running and I love distance running so I'm now putting up enough miles to need new shoes 2-3 times a year, a nice Garmin smart watch and heart rate monitor to track my progress, sign-ups for several long-distance races each year, shorts, socks, you get the picture.
Could I do it cheaper? Yeah. But at the end of the day it's a hobby and I like it
selfhosting/homelab. Originally started just using retired gaming PC parts to build a server. All it cost was the power to run the system. Years later and with more things/content I have, I just added a 5x 18tb hard drives and 3x 8tb. Just the 5 18tb drives was like $1500.
Yeah me as well.
Had a cheap server that had 2 x 2tb for stuff I wanted to access while away
Then turned into 3 x 8tb for redundancy and ZFS
Then turned into 2 x 3 x 20tb for dual redundancy and ZFS1
Now I want to upgrade to ECC memory and the cpu, Mobo, and ram will likely cost over $1k.
Plus with more hardware it will use more power. I'm at 125w normal usage. That costs me $284 a year to run my stack.
Have you tried playing table tennis? It starts tame, but as soon as you get a bit competitive and learn about custom rackets...
I just drained my bank account last weekend for a new racket and box, a few new balls,...
3D printing.
Houseplants.
It started with a little green in the living room and suddenly turned into a full grown, humid, highly poisonous indoor jungle thatβs thirsty as fuck. And it turns out that exotic plants, fancy pots, growing lights, different types of soil for different species, fertilizers, and dozens of liters of water every day are somehow expensiveβ¦
Edit: yes, I love it
Collecting military surplus/old random military shit. Helmets, great coats, radios, a field phone, ww2 machete. Ya get the idea.
what do you do with it though? Just have your own small museum?
I think audio, headphones, amps, all this stuff. Microphones, recorders, physical mixing gear. If I would go in that direction, I would need a seperate room and loots of money
I just wanted a nice set of headphones to listen to stuff.
Then I learned my lack of a DAC was bottlenecking the setup.
Then I learned me not having gold plated braided and custom made cables was bottlenecking the setup.
Then I learned I can't hear a damn difference lmao
Hahaha btw what headphones you got?
I have some Sennheiser ones and my goto 1more pistonfit in ear with cable and a nice button and even mic, great for 17β¬
Gaming consoles and all of the parts for fixing and modding them. Got an OG Xbox that crashed, so I bought new caps, then I needed a soldering iron, then I got an Xbox 360 so I needed a modchip and a flasher as well as a 4TB harddrive and then I got a FAT PS3 with broken SMD caps so I needed a preheater and a hot air station and then I needed to get all of these controllers which are worn out so I needed potentiometers, thumbsticks...
I do play my PS2, PS3, Xbox, 360, One etc. all the time (they don't just sit in my room to look pretty) but yeah, I 've probably sunk thousands of euros into maintaining them. π
I use the equipment to repair other things I get for free or very cheap, so it's not just a money sink...or at least that's how I rationalize my hobby. Repaired a Nikon camera with it...then I bought lenses...just another rabbithole!
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