Hi guys, I am thinking of selling my old server which until now I have been using as a mini home lab. But now that I have a dedi on hetzner, I don’t really see the point of keeping it around. What do you guys use your home lab for and why do you prefer it over cloud hosting?
Cost, privacy, and control.
No matter what happens to stuff outside my network, I have full control over my data and hardware, without paying someone for thiers.
I still haven’t set up my self hosting stuff yet, still moving things in with my girlfriend and unpacking but I’ll be using my mini PCs for home assistant, nextcloud, immich, and Jellyfin to start with. May set up some arr services as well but I kinda like to just pay for things to own them if I can.
Massive data storage streaming and backup and game servers. Disk space and CPU and bandwidth for that in the cloud would be…a lot. A lot a lot, vs a $150 rack server off EBay and a pile of used SAS drives.
Power is pretty cheap here though. All my machines run at about 150-250 watts total, that can add up if your costs are high.
Also I just like my stuff here instead of somewhere else.
- full disk encryption!
- being independent of big corp
- generally like DIY
- more levels for tinkering when I want to
- cheaper, especially storage
- not reliant on their support (had some issue once that took months for Hetzner to resolve and I couldn’t do anything about it)
Cloud costs, monthly.
Specifically storage. It’s vastly cheaper to keep a couple TB locally, even when you have redundancy.
I use my home server as media library and cloud gaming device (kvm with sunshine). Also I hosted my friends web sites and some my sites.
hosting my home lab’s server on hetzner would have been much more expensive I think.
I’m local first - stuff I’m testing, playing with, or “production” stuff like Jellyfin, Forgeo, AudioBookshelf, Kavita etc etc. Local is faster, more secure, and storage is cheap. But then some of my other stuff that needs 24/7 access from the internet - websites and web apps - they go on the VPS.
I prefer local for privacy. probably hetzner doesn’t look into your belongings, but if police comes knocking because so you said something mean to certain someones, you may not even know your data was stolen. you don’t need to be an activist for it to happen.
you can also keep backups there. and its accessible without internet.
The police can’t take a local server with them?
they can, but you sure will know something happened and you can take precautions, like encrypting the drives
They can, but I can encrypt it so they won’t be able to access anything
You may want to have a dead man’s switch so that the server shuts down without your intervention, or there’s the possibility that a forensic team could retrieve the encryption key in RAM through some physical attacks.
Usually the cops raiding homes just take the stuff to some lab. Not saying such an attack is impossible but I don’t think that’s high up in my risk assessment.
At the least you would know it’s happening and that you’ve been compromised. A hoster might also be inclined to be a lot more accommodating than you are. And mass information requests do happen. You wouldn’t even be targeted if you host locally. The privacy advantages are numerous
I host many services on my server. Just to list a few: my website, Jellyfin, Lemmy, a Monero node, and Nextcloud.
My main reasons for choosing home-hosting over cloud-hosting are:
- Full Privacy
- Complete Data Ownership
- Local Access
I host a couple of encrypted snapshots in the cloud (stuff that I can’t afford to lose), but it’s still vastly cheaper to host a massive amount of data locally.
The stuff I have locally mostly stuff I can recover elsewhere (yarr), so redundancy without backup is good enough cost-wise.
If you’re grand with internet outages, why not?
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How does a UPS solve Internet outages?
For my lab its testing ideas. More often than not, it involved hardware outside the server. Cloud hosted is not an option for that, or playing with a variety of distributions, testing applications, etc.
I actually have a hybrid setup. My public DNS and my mail server are in the cloud as those are too important to risk going down. I also have a FreeIPA replica in the cloud to help manage them. Then I set basically everything else up in my homelab because I don’t care if roundcube goes down so long as IMAP and SMTP still work.
