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?
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
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.
I largely run raspberry pis so my electric costs are likely minimal (I’ve never calculated it). Besides that:
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PIA VPN: ~$4/mo
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Digital Ocean Droplet + Backup snapshots: $7/mo
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Domains: ~$25/year
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Backblaze B2 backups: $7/mo
Thanks actually quite reasonable.
Self hosting is actually crazy cheap compared to any kind of corporate solution. Anybody paying for SquareSpace, for instance, could cut their cost by a factor of 20 or more with a FOSS alternative like Ghost Blog.
I know my setup is over engineered a little so I pay a bit more, but my expenses are still under $100 per year for subscription services that support the self hosting.
$2.50 per month for a VPN.
$40 per year for two VPS’s (this is what I know I overpay for since I didn’t really know how much I needed when I set it up, but the time to change it is worth more to me than the extra $10 per year).
$17ish per year for a domain name.
Plex lifetime pass (around $100 one time).
And of course, ten million dollars in man hours spent learning how to use Linux.
Those man hours rack up, but I bet you still feel exhilarated when you get something working or fix something.
My wife says she wishes she could make me scream like Linux does. I told her she would if I could put it in her bash.
She leaves me alone when I’m on the computer now. It’s quiet in here.
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