This is the really cool thing about the internet. When otherwise would these 2 16 year olds have found each other?

They would otherwise have had to go to the same high school.

Your parents are probably footing a large electricity bill for this running hardware unless there is a revenue stream for your services? Either way, hats off to your folks for supporting your interest.

I know, my smart plug reports around 60€ a month of costs. Most of it comes from the massive amount of hard drives, I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects. Anyway, I couldn't find rentable dedicated servers with this much storage for less than 50€ a month, the upfront costs of new, energy efficient and powerful hardware is too much, and I truly enjoy running these servers myself.

About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be heard from the rest of the room.

IMHO it's a good way to get your parents to pay for your hosting costs without having to beg :)

I was in a similar situation regarding storage. I ended up having to upgrade the drives for fewer bigger ones but there are other ways to reduce power consumption like putting your storage server on a timer and turning on WoL so that you can wake it up out of those hours if you need to. Obviously this is not possible if you are serving files to other users 24/7.

You could be right — but it's hard to resist the cheap hardware you can find on eBay. I see numerous Hyve Zeus 1U servers on eBay right now for a couple hundred bucks — just add an SSD.

You’re not wrong, but as a parent I would be very pleased to pay that bill. Best bargain in education I could ask for.

That is so cool! I've also been thinking of adding an old graphics card somewhere to support some ML stuff too - I just have to figure out how :)

Who pays the electric bill? Sounds like it’s in the 50-100USD a month range for those two servers.

60€ a month (tplink smart plug, calculated on the cost per kwh and other taxes). I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects

Good on you and all but I wanted to note that its weird how persistently people are focusing on the powerbill. It is a drop in the bucket for many households monthly bills and very cheap as hobbies go. I think my mother would have killed for that deal.

As a 15 years old, I desperately wanted to keep my old desktop running 24/7 to run my own website, learn PHP, linux and do some selfhosting. I wasn't able to run it more than 2 days in a row as my parents would always shut it down to save in power

60EUR absolutely isn't a drop in the bucket for households in the EU, that can be a monthly bill for someone living in a smaller apartment.

Yeah, it is still a relatively small increase considering all your other bills, and rent, and food, and etc. what are you estimating the monthly budget to be for these small apartments?

60EUR a month is also pretty cheap for a hobby. If you can't count on your parents for even that level of support you might be better of getting emancipated.

Really depends on the country and how small we’re talking, but I’d guess somewhere between 500-1000€. At 16 you’re getting quite old so you probably also want some kind of allowance, if this is on top of that then it can add up.

Because we've all felt the pain of power bills shooting up by 2-3x in a very short period of time, perhaps?

The cost of running a PC 24/7 used to feel insignificant, but not so much any more. I've been running an old PC as a home server for years, but should probably find a more power-efficient NAS box to replace it with.

Still feels weird to take that out on a random 16 year old.

He’s a 16 years old doing a very productive activity, I’d expect the parents to happily pay for it, I’d argue that if someone’s son is interested in learn ing and the energy bill is obstacle to wait before to make kids, parents should feel an obligation to fuel their kids passions

As a former 16 year old, I distinctively remember having to negotiate to be allowed to run a computer 24/7 as a server. Part of my argument was calculating the cost to run the server ($10 / month for a 100 watt server at 0.10 / kwh running 24/7, a rough figure I use when referencing electricity costs to this day).

I had to submit an essay to my father, at 16, about why I should be allowed to use a computer more than an hour per day.

The essay won, but my father began talking about me while I was at the computer, saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family anymore.

I was learning to code. I built a bunch of websites, and some projects and schemes that earned me fairly serious money in high school. I learned VB6, html, a little perl, and php, on my own, with no mentor, and an active booing.

I'm not sure my dad has ever seen or visited a website I've built (dozens, maybe over 100). I even have bespoke code deployed right now, serving him, that he does not know exists.

I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an active supporter, like many kids have.

I can't speak for your father of course, but I do think he likely had a valid concern that he may not have effectively communicated that all of this time with the computer was directly at the expense of time spent with the family. He may have felt hurt that you seemed to prefer the company of a machine to his and the rest of your family. He and you may also have very different conceptions of what a successful/happy life might look like. I'm not saying he's right, but from the outside I can imagine why he might not have felt supportive and also why you might feel resentful for the lack of support.

Have you directly asked him why he wasn't supportive? Have you been open to his perspective or just assume that you're right and he's wrong? It's easy for us programmer types to try and simulate the mind states of others to avoid difficult conversations (speaking for myself of course).

> I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time. I often think about where I'd be if I had an active supporter, like many kids have.

He was probably concerned about your familiar relationships. All relationships have an element of reciprocity. Plus he probably just missed you.

In your situation it sounds like he could have benefited by being a bit more curious and accepting.

IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child cancels out all the loving things you do because then you are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary version of the child that only exists in your own head.

> IMHO as a parent rejecting the authencity of a child cancels out all the loving things you do because then you are not loving the child. You are loving an imaginary version of the child that only exists in your own head.

sooo many parents are guilty of this. Living through your child is unhealthy

"I still don't know why he tried to stand in my way all the time"

Maybe he did not try to stand in your way, but was simply worried:

"saying I was a zombie who wasn't part of the family anymore."

Yup I see my son enjoying time on the tablet and teaching himself scratch which is great... But it clearly has an effect on his emotional state and overall quality of life if he spends too much time on it. We try and keep things balanced - he has plenty of time to do more programming in his life!

> with no mentor

I don't think most programmers had any, in the age of 'everyone can code' it might be different but back then, you just read a book

Some people (even to this day) just equate computer usage with goofing off. :(

Doesn't matter if you're a highly paid IT professional, if they see you using a computer they assume you're being slack and have suggestions (repeatedly) on better uses for your time.

Yep, this can be very frustrating.

As a former 16-year old, very grateful for my parents for doing exactly this to support my passions :)

At €60 a month, that is €720 a year.

OP indicated elsewhere here that they’re trying to cover some of the costs with side projects, but €720 anually is a big bill to foot for less affluent parents.

Eh, power bill is the best one for an increase to appear on, way more wiggle room before anything important is shut off.

Plus if we're talking about being poor it has two important benefits 1) excellent hours occupied to dollar spent ratio 2) engrossing hobbies typically mean they aren't out there rattling around stirring up trouble (which can get expensive in a hurry)

Money well invested considering the guy seems to know more than some IT professionals already.

I don’t want to get into whether the ability to afford these things for your children makes you more/less of a good parent…

But if you can afford it, you absolutely should support their passions. The only reason I’m a high salaried software engineer is because my parents generously bought me a computer, allowed me to attend classes (programming in BASIC), etc.

It's quite normal for parents to pay for their children's hobbies.

At least for rich parents :)

I'm father of a 10 years old kid. If he wants to run a server at 16, I will give him the electricity bills, a 20U rack, a cisco switch and a bunch of cables. Congratulations to the OP and their family.

When I was a kid in the 90s my dad had raised money to buy a good car. When the time came, he bought a not so good car + a computer for me. I still remember installing windows 3.1 from 40 floppy disks

My memory says that win3.1 came on just 7 floppies. Did you install from 5.25 floppies?

Maybe 7 feels like 40 when you're 13.

40 is for Win95. Around 20+ for Warp 4.

I installed ESIX (Everex's SysV Unix) off of 40-something 3.5" floppies in the mid 90s. Naturally there were a couple of bad disks and the installation sat partially done for a few days while I awaited replacements to arrive in the mail.

Good one. I guess I had win 3.1 and upgraded to 95

IFMMSMV CD distr of '95 was around 48Mb, '98 (SE2 ?) around 100-110. With a bit of knowledge you could shrink the installed one to 35 and and 52 respectively.

Source: had a 486 with 40+120Mb HDDs

What if your kid wants to start a semiconductor fab in your basement?

(yes, these kids exist)

"We're gunna need a bigger basement" :)

Mine is in the 50-100EUR range per year, powered on all the time. Dell Poweredge T320 with Xeon-2428L and an SSD.

>businesses decommissioning hardware been looking for this for years but never found them in my country (India). Been a 16 year old with a homelab once, now older but no business hardware yet

Grande!

I'm also an Italian who taught himself how to code at 16 (I'm now 34), although not even remotely at your level. Then I studied physics, did a PhD, a postdoc about neural networks, etc., but I felt that what mattered to me the most was to inspire young people like the one I was, and I decided to come back to Italy and become a high school teacher starting this year. I'm also organizing an extracurricular python course in my school. If you're not based far from Milan and are interested in talking to my students, we could consider that! Good luck with everything.