1.4 KiB
Self Hosting
Why
I've chosen to self-host my servers as opposed to using one of numerous cloud offerings from the likes of AWS and GCP.
This boils down to one reason, recurring payment. I feel much more at ease knowing that I don't have to keep my credit-card up to date and that my servers will still be here tomorrow even if I get a new card in the mail.
This also makes it easier to expand. Sure, I could spin up a server that's equivalent to my london-b server but AWS would charge me 868 USD per month for the pleasure.
If I extrapolate that to a whole year for all my servers I have running I would be looking at a whopping 14,168 USD per year (1,180 USD per month).
It also has the side-effect that I get to have a rack cabinet in my house which brings at least some street cred when having people over.
How
These servers were kind of free, they consist either of my old personal computers for gaming that I've repurposed into servers as I no longer have a particular interest in gaming (at least not enough to warrent a dedicated machine).
Everything I have installed on the servers is controlled and deployed via Ansible so if I got a new server all I need to do is install the OS, setup SSH keys and install Tailscale. That's it, Ansible will take it from there and deploy things like node-exporter, portainer-agent and any other roles I have assigned to the specific server.