VPS are very expensive for what you get. If you have the capital, doing it yourself saves you money very quickly. It's not rare to pay $50 for a semi-decent VPS, but for $2000 you would get an absolute beast that would last 10 years at the very least.
With Docker, maintenance is basically zero and unused services are stopped or restarted with 1 command.
I've also self hosted for decades, but it turns out i don't really need that much, at least not public.
I basically just need mail, calendar, file storage and DNS adblocking. I can get mail/calendar/file storage with pretty much any cloud provider (and no, there is no privacy when it comes to mail, there is always another participant in the conversation), and for €18/year i can get something like NextDNS, Control D, or similar.
For reference, a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 will use around 50 kWh per year, which (again in europe) will translate to €15/year. For just €3 more per year i get redundancy and support.
I still run a bunch of stuff at home, but nothing is opened to the public internet. Everything runs behind a Wireguard VPN, and i have zero redundant storage. My home storage is used for backing up cloud storage, as well as storing media and client backups. And yes, i also have another cloud where i backup to.
My total cloud bill is around €20-€25/month, with 8TB of storage, ad blocking DNS, mail/calendar/office apps and even a small VPS.
Not to mention that I love them.
As for electric heating, that is true in 1:1 heating scenarios, but i assume you guys are also using heat pumps these days, and while you still get heat "for free", it will not be anywhere as efficient as your heat pump.
Yes, it's probably peanuts in the grand scheme of things, i know our air to water heat pump in Denmark uses around 4500-5500 kWh per year, so adding another 100 kWh probably won't mean much.
On my homelab, I update everything every quarter and it takes about 1 hour, so 4 hours a year is pretty reasonable. Docker helps a lot with this.
And I’ve almost never run into trouble in years, so I have very few unexpected maintenance tasks.
EDIT: I am referring to a homelab that is only accessible for private purposes through a VPN.
If you only access your homelab over VPN or similar, then by all means, update whenever you feel like it, but if you expose your services to the internet, you want to be damned sure there are no vulnerabilities in them.
The internet of today is not like it was 20 years ago. Today you're constantly being hammerede by bots that scan every single IPv4 address for open ports, and when they find something they record it in a database, along with information on what's running on that port (provided that information is available).
When (not if) a vulnerability for a given service is discovered, an attacker doesn't need to "hunt & peck" for vulnerable hosts, they already have that information in a database, and all they need to do is start shooting at their list of hosts.
You can use something like shodan.io to see what a would be attacker might see (can check your own IP with "ip:xxx.xxx.xxx.xx".
Try entering something like Synology, Proxmox, Truenas, Unraid, Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, or any of the other popular home services.
RSS feeds FTW
I got this setup automatically with Renovate: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/homelab/blob/main/src/cdk8...
Google One for 10TB is 274,99€/mo (at least in my country) so you'd make the entire nas price and subscription cost within a few months, let alone years.
There just aren't compelling public cloud for large sizes (My NAS is 30TB capacity and I'm using 18 right now) and even if you go the more complex loops with like S3 and whatnot you still get billed more than it's worth. Public cloud is meant for public files, there's a lot of costs you're paying for stuff you don't need like being fast to access from everywhere.
Even at the high end estimate the homelab is giving you several times the storage for the same cost.
Very few people i know has use for that much storage. Yes, you can download the entire netflix catalog, and that will of course require more storage, and no, you probably shouldn't put it in the cloud (or even back it up, or use redundant storage for it).
Setting up your own homelab to be your own netflix, but using pirated content, is not really a use case i would consider. I'm aware people are doing it, and i still think it's stupid. They're saving money by "stealing" (or at least breaking laws), which is hardly a lifehack.
My wife is a professional photographer, and while we do archive most of her RAW files somewhere else, pretty much everything HEIC, JPEG or any other compressed format lives in our main cloud.
We have 2.2TB in total for “direct storage”, and we’re currently using around 1.5TB, and that’s including myself and our kids.
My personal photo library has just short of 90,000 photos, and about 5,000 videos. My wife’s library is roughly twice that. I have no idea how many photos the kids have, but they each take up around 200GB for photos.
And then we have backups, which actually take up about 1TB per person, mostly because that’s the space I’ve allocated for each, so history just grows until it’s filled. Photos ideally won’t change much. We backup originals along with XMP metadata for edits, so the photos stays the same, and changes are described in easily compressed text files. Backups of course also have deduplication enabled.
My friend, in her mid 20s, uses nearly 3tb of apple cloud space with photos and videos, mostly of her kids and dog.
I dont even film much but im using about a terabyte.
There’s always a “right tool for the job”. Sometimes it’s the cloud. Sometimes it isn’t. The article is for people who found the cloud isn’t a good fit and need something at home.
A lot of people have large collections of music or movies. Or want to keep full control over some data no matter the cost. Or need it to work without internet. There are many solid reasons to avoid the cloud and use your own solution.
You are arguing that your original assertion isn’t wrong, people’s stated needs must be wrong. Because you have different needs so others must be doing it wrong. And this undermines everything else you say.
Yes.
> (excluding things you've downloaded from the internet)
Why on earth would I do that? My storage includes things I downloaded from the internet that are not there anymore/hard to find/now paywalled. If you were thinking the only thing to download from the internet is pirated media - I haven't included that in my >2TB assessment.
For my personal use case, that involves photos and documents, all things i cannot easily recreate (photos less so). Those are what matters to me, and storing them in the cloud means i not only get redundancy in a single data center, but also geographical redundancy as many cloud providers will use erasure coding to make your data available across multiple data centers.
Everything else will be just fine on a single drive, even a USB drive, as everything that originated on the internet can most likely be found there again. This is especially true for media (purchased, or naval aquisition). Media is probably the most replicated data on the planet, possibly only behind the bible and IKEA catalog.
So, back to the important data, i can easily fit an entire family of 4 into a single 2TB data plan. That costs me somewhere around €85 - €100 per year, for 4 people, and it works no matter what i do. I no longer need to drag a laptop with me on vacation, and i can basically just say "fuck it" and go on vacation for 2 weeks.
If you need to commute to work daily, and you're concerned about the cost, you don't really care if you're comparing a city car vs a sports car vs the bus, despite on goes at 80km/h, and another can do 230km/h, if all you're interested in is the price.
Obviously as your storage needs increase, so will cloud costs, but unless you're a professional photographer, I'm guessing 2TB will be more than enough for most people.
Again, not talking about people trying to run their own media server on pirated content, and saving money that way. In my book that's comparable to saving money by robbing a bank. You're not saving anything, you're breaking the law, and 9 out of 10 times, it's cheaper to steal someone else's bike than it is taking a taxi home.
I'm talking actual storage for data you actually own, and possibly even data you have created yourself. Anything that came from the internet can be found on the internet again, purchased or naval acquisition.
2 TB ought to good for everyone is hilarious. There is so many people I know who would fill 512 GB phone in 1-2 year with photos and videos.
Maybe you do not have use case or situation where larger storage is needed. But it is strange to assume everyone in same bucket.
I would that this were true. I guess it depends on what you mean by "the internet", but there's a reason the Internet Archive exists. Sure, you don't need to back up your recent Firefox installer or your Debian ISO but lots of important and valuable data can't be found on the internet anymore. There are very valid reasons that groups like Archiveteam [1] do what they do, not to mention recent headlines like individuals losing access to their entire cloud storage [2].
[1] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Main_Page [2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/aws_wipes_ten_years/
All this assuming that you even need that much storage, which most people definitely do not.
In any case, you should always make backups regardless of where your data is stored. At home, your biggest threat is loss of data, probably through hardware malfunction, house fires or similar.
In the cloud your biggest threat is not loss of data but loss of access to data. Different scenarios but identical outcomes.
Backup solves both scenarios, RAID doesn't solve any of them, but sadly, many people think "oh but I've got RAID6 so surely I cannot lose data".
Of course, syncing a NAS between yourself and a friend or family member's home may be the better solution over cloud options.
It’s also an excuse for me to stay in most summer days.
I, for one, don't want to have Google, etc. as a dependency[1], so I will pay some energy cost to do that.
1: see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Who are you to tell people how to spend their time? Let people have hobbies ffs
It isn’t unreasonable to want some alone time.
Once your user count goes beyond 1, you suddenly have a SLA as people are dependent on your services. Like it or not, you are now the primary support staff of your local cloud business.
The more users you get, the more time you will need to spend to fix problems.
At which point does it go from a hobby to a 2nd job ?
The thing is, it's worth it to learn. Do you know the basics of how to set up a completely redundant environment? There's no conceptual difference between setting one up at home by using consumer equipment and setting it up in a data center. You can get pretty capable equipment (Mikrotik) for less. The enterprise stuff has more configuration options, but it's doubtful that you'll use most of them.
Set up backup WANs, redundant routing, DNS, power, etc is fun. Setting up redundant load balancers, backend services, databases, etc is also fun. It's not hard to do, it's just hard to get it all right. There are probably a zillion configuration parameters you can mess with, and only a few sets actually work. Unfortunately, the sets that work in your home won't be the ones that will work in production, but you could possibly run load tests etc to simulate a real environment (though simulating multiple clients from multiple endpoints is harder than you think).
And of course, getting production equipment is hard. Nobody has 2 F5s lying around. And you really need at least 4 F5s, because you have redundant locations. That's a lot of cashola. And in most environments you wouldn't want some random person messing around with the production (or test) F5s. It's the same with NAS, VM servers, docker registries, etc.
I suspect getting the whole end-to-end setup isn't something people experience anymore, because small companies have (or at least should have) moved to the cloud by now.
However, it also depends on how you use that data. In my case, I'm a Sunday photographer, so I tend to wrangle multiple GB of data at a time. I usually edit my photos locally, but I sometimes will want to revisit older stuff. I can download it, but it's a PITA and s_l_o_w. Google drive file stream is terrible for this, you never know if the files are uplaoded or not. Onedrive isn't any better. I haven't tried dropbox.
Hetzner has some storage box which exposes SMB but doesn't seem to enforce encryption nor IP filtering, so I'm not very comfortable with that.
Also, my internet connection pretends I have 5 Gb down, 0.5 up. The down part is usually as expected (my machine only has a 1 Gb nic), but upload is sometimes very slow. Running a local NAS is much faster. It's ZFS, so backups are trivial to send to encrypted offsite storage.
It also doesn't need to run 24/7, which helps with power usage (0.22 €/kWh here).
> I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is finite, you can always make more money.
Indeed. Waiting around for files to transfer gets old quick. I have better things to do with my time. My NAS needs a whopping five minutes of my time every now and again when a new kernel comes out.
don't spend your time cooking food, pay for others to prepare it for you.
don't spend your time maintainig a house, rent and let someone else do the maintenance.
just lease a car and get a new one automatically every 3 years.
honestly, everyone has their own setpoint for things. and there are degrees of solutions for every point you make.
I think most people would benefit from being just a little bit self-sovereign.
Personally, "majority of people" could use one low power fanless server with 1tb for the few things most people need continuously online.
And separately a server you turn on occasionally with lots of storage, like maybe
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TV1XPDD
I'm reminded of jwz's backups info www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
"RAID is a goddamn waste of your time and money"
My homelab is my hobby. I maintain it for my pleasure and to learn new skills. We have an infra nerds club with a few colleagues and we're having a lot of fun comparing our approaches!
To some, spending time hunched over servers is doing things they love.
I mean, each and every thing you said about maintaining a home lab you can also say about maintaining cloud infrastructure.
There was a time when having hobbies was normal. It seems nowadays some people mistake hobbies for work after hours? Where is that hacker mindset?
Every homelab I have come across is a hobby project and time sink that is more like a backyard garden or classic car.
Agreed, but it doesn't have to take time from your family. I'm on a small team that self-hosts internal services to lower costs/risks. It takes very little time to maintain, and maintenance windows happen on our terms. Our uptime this year is better than "Github Actions", the latency is incredible, and we've had no known security issues.
There are two keys to doing this successfully: (1) don't deploy anything you don't understand (so it won't take you long to fix), and (2) even then, aggressively avoid complexity (so it doesn't break in the first place.)
For example, despite significant network expertise, we stuck to a basic COTS router and a simple IPv4 subnet for our servers. And the services we run are typically self-contained golang binaries that we can deploy with bash onto baremetal. No docker, kvm, ansible, or k8s.
This DIY setup saves us considerably more than it costs. Not for everyone, but with proper scoping, many readers of hacker news could pull this off without losing time with their loved ones.
You will end up paying much more for your services, along with spending a ton of time maintaining it (and if you don't, you will probably find yourself on the end of a 0-day hack sometime).
In Northern/Western Europe, where power costs around €0.3/kWh on average, just the power consumption of a simple 4 bay NAS will cost you almost as much as buying Google Drive / OneDrive / iCloud / Dropbox / Jottacloud / Whatever.
A simple Synology 4 bay NAS like a DS923+ with 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drives will use between 150 kWh and 300 kWh per year (100% idle vs 100% active, so somewhere in between), which will cost you between €45 and €90 per year, and that's power alone. Factoring in the cost of the hardware will probably double that (over a 5 year period).
It's cheaper (and easier) to use public cloud, and then use something like Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to encrypt data before uploading it. That way you get the best of both worlds, privacy without any of the sysadm tasks.
Edit: I'll just add, as you grow older, you come to realize that time is a finite resource, and while money may seem like it is finite, you can always make more money.
Don't spend your time hunched over servers. Spend it doing things you love with people that matter to you. Eventually those people won't be there anymore, and the memories you make with those people will matter far more to you in 20 years, than the €20/month you paid for cloud services.