Someone else's computer, rented by the hour: what my spare room costs versus the cloud

Every few weeks someone on here tells me the cloud is cheaper. Sometimes it is. So I sat down with a pot of tea, my power bill, and my receipts, and worked it out properly. I have included the numbers that do not flatter me, because a comparison that only counts one side is an advertisement.

What is in the spare room

• One Dell OptiPlex 7060 Micro, i5-8500T, 32GB, running Proxmox. About a dozen containers and two small VMs.
• One HP MicroServer Gen10 Plus with four 4TB drives in ZFS, about 7TB usable after redundancy.
• A small managed switch, the NBN box, and a UPS.

The homelab, per year

• Power: 58W average at the wall, measured over three months with a plug-in meter. That is about 508 kWh a year. At roughly 30 cents a kWh on my bill, about $152.
• Hardware: about $1,400 for everything, which I expect to last five years. $280 a year.
• Drive replacements: I budget one drive every two years. About $100 a year.
• Offsite backup of the important 1TB to object storage: about $100 a year.

Total: roughly $630 a year, a bit over $50 a month.

The cloud, for the same job

I will not quote a cloud provider's price list. They change, and the calculators tell you what you want to hear. But one number is simple. 7TB in object storage at $6 a terabyte a month is about $42 a month, before I run a single virtual machine, and before anybody charges me to download my own photos. Add compute for the containers and the two VMs, running 24 hours a day, and every way I priced it came out at two to four times my number.

The honest part

Here is what my $50 a month does not include:

• My time. I value it at nothing, because I am retired and this is my hobby. If you are 30 with a job and a family, your evenings are not free, and you should count them.
• Location. It is all in one room. A fire or a burst pipe takes it all. The offsite copy is my insurance, and it only covers what I chose to send.
• Bandwidth. My upload is 20 Mbps. Serving anything to the public from here is a joke.
• The bus factor. If I fall under one, my wife has a box she cannot operate. There is a folder, the Binder, with instructions in plain English, but she has made it clear she will be calling my nephew.

So which is it?

The cloud wins when the load is spiky, when users are all over the world, when you need someone on call who is not you, or when your time is worth more than your money. The spare room wins when the load is steady, 24 hours a day, every day, when you have a lot of storage, and when you enjoy it.

Most home workloads are the second kind. A photo library does not need to scale. It needs to sit there quietly and be there in twenty years.

And do not get me started on what has happened to the price of power over the last few years. Whichever lot is in Canberra, it only goes one way.

Cheers, G.