I wonder how you build such a hardware with just $2k (3990x alone seems to cost $3.5k), but with €94/mon you can get 16C32T, 128Gb, 8TB server from Hetzner[1]. It has Zen 3 5950X which has better single core performance than your 64 core assuming that you refer to 3990X, and often single core perf is more important than total perf because you don't use all cores all the time.
I estimate such a configuration to be $2.5k. With $2.5k you can keep the server for 2 years, with network and electricity provided by Hetzner. Also you can terminate it and rent another, better server at any time.
I thank the death of Moore's Law. Compute power obsoletes very slowly these days. Back in the 90s I was buying new equipment every year or two.
My primary hobby server is now 12 years old and going strong. My youngest server is 8 years old.
Every now and then I start shopping for an upgrade but eventually decide I'll spend the money later. It's still good enough for my needs and works well.
I do not regret one bit going for this set-up, although my next step toward scaling this up is indeed going to be some sort of hosted solution, the primary reason being the BTUs and decibels involved in running an actual server from my apartment.
Running a search engine or not, anyone with a serious interest in programming should have a server. I really can't recommend it enough. The ability to run large jobs that chew through hundreds of gigabytes of data for weeks if need be, without considering the cost, that dramatically increases the level of ambition you can have in your projects.
* I had an idea for a re-skinned wikipedia. So I processed all 40 gigabytes of wikipedia articles from an OpenZIM file. Took a week. No big deal. Later I used the same corpus to calculate language data models. That's another several days.
* I had an idea a while back. It required me to screengrab 500,000 websites. So I wrote a python script. Takes anywhere between 0.5-120 seconds per site. It's still not finished by any stretch, but I'm up to about 322,000 screenshots now.
It's just great.
That 64 core server is probably sitting nearly idle most of the time. You don’t just spin up big systems on AWS and leave them idle. The whole point of cloud computing is the on-demand scalability.
You can basically spend nothing until a request comes in, and most hobby projects are low traffic.
For example, I found a project that runs plex media server encoding jobs as Kubernetes pods: https://github.com/munnerz/kube-plex
When you’re not encoding anything, you’re not running much compute.
I think I’ve heard of game servers that wait for players to attempt to connect before starting the instance. If all you’re doing is playing a multiplayer game with friends that instance is going to be off 20+ hours a day.
Still, I haven’t done any napkin math on what applications represent cost savings.
True, my system is fairly static. But it scales when I need it. As mentioned, it's for my personal use. "on-demand scalability" is a bullshit buzzword in this context. My goal was to buy a machine capable of several specific tasks.
> That 64 core server is probably sitting nearly idle most of the time > ... plex media server > ... encoding > ... game servers > ... that instance is going to be off 20+ hours a day.
Not those tasks :-) I have no trouble maxxing out my disk IO and memory, slightly more challenging to keep my CPU busy but it's keeping an average load of 4-8.
If you can't keep a machine busy, just turn it off. Simple as that. I would not have bought such a beast if I didn't have a plan keep it busy!
I got 48 vCPUs and 96GB DDR3 for <$300 in 2016 off eBay. It isn't the most powerful, but it was cheap.
Together with a full standing rack on wheels, I bought them for $600 cash (plus U-Haul rental to get it home).
My trick is craigslist in a city with datacenters (PHX). There are resellers here who buy used hardware from local datacenters and resell them to smaller businesses. I've had it running 24x7 for almost 3 years now and it is still going strong.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ has some good references for acquiring hardware for a home lab setup.
The closest I can get a disposed server with those specs is at least 8k
At least that was the case when I set up my home server rack ~2 years ago. (Though 24TB might be too much since server grade SAS storage is very expensive even when it's used. So what I did was to buy servers with as little storage as possible and then just put SATA HDDs that I can get for dirt cheap.)
Is the RAM ECC ? Are the drives in a RAID configuration? Is it kept in a server rack? What router, switch, and firewall are your using?
I think in you case colocation data center would be alternative solution.
I have a setup similar to the OP and there's a really good reason for it: cost. For $2k in hardware (one time) and a VPS + electricity at $20/mo, I can run a 64 core, 192Gb, 24TB server. Let's call that $4400 over the course of 10 years. You would burn through that budget in roughly 1 month to get the same specs on AWS.
Obviously I'm neglecting the impact and cost of network, if it's a hobby you can just reuse your existing connection but you can always buy a dedicated line (and adjust the cost calculation accordingly)
In terms of security, you can mitigate the surface area by running a reverse proxy on the VPS. I've got nginx on the front line which does TLS then proxy_passes to my basement server at its wireguard IP address. So it's strictly limited to http, no direct database or ssh access.
I don't know if I'd ever run a "real" website this way but it's great for hobbies and side projects.