What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?
I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.
Edit: I feel the need to reduce both – the resources, to host multiple things on one system, and cost, to buy/pay for multiple systems. Currently, I have 2 ARM VPSes and 1 old MacBook Air as a home server.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation PSU Power Supply Unit SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #208 for this sub, first seen 11th Oct 2023, 08:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
- Use sqlite instead of Postgres, MariaDB
- Avoid enterprise software (Kubernetes, Elastic Search)
- Only use projects with efficient programming languages such as Go, Rust, etc.
- Try to run things bare metal
- Lookout for projects which name themself minimal or light-weight
I use a Raspberry Pi 2 to self host a Dashboard written in Rust (Axum), a RSS reader called yarr and a music streaming server Navidrome. The latter two are written in Go and very resource efficient. The electricity bill should be under a Euro a month (6.4W max power consumption).
Cost-cutting is corporate-greed mindset, therefore you have to solve it with the same mindset.
Fire people ! Even you if needed. And let the end-users deal with the outcome.
(This is not a serious post ^^ )
My favorite cost cutting tip is to avoid big webapps running on docker, and instead do with small UNIX utilities (cron instead of a calendar, text files instead of note taking app, rsync instead of a filehosting dropbox-like app, simple static webserver for file sharing, etc). This allows me to run my server on a simple Raspberry Pi, with less than 500mb of used RAM in average, and mininal energy consumption. So, total cost of the setup:
- Raspberry Pi : 77€ x 2 = 144€ (I bought two to have a backup if the first one fails)
- MicroSD 64gb : 13€ x 2 = 26€ (main and backup)
- average energy consumption : 0.41€ (2kWh) per month
With that, I run all services I need on a single machine, and I have a backup plan for recovery of both hardware and software.
Getting used to a UNIX shell and to UNIX philosophy can take some time, but it’s very rewarding in making everything more simple (thus more efficient).
cron instead of a calendar
What do you mean by that?
Do you use crontab to save events?
Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it’s usually done by setting the
MAILTOvariable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).I use that to do things like:
0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with
crontab -l. If it’s not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.And to expand further on simplicity, one can avoid using email and send messages over ntfy with just a POST curl call.
I like your setup!
Damn, I’m doing *nixes for nearly 30 years. But never went to that level of minimalism. Nice trick.
Fasting allows you to waste less money on food and invest more money into your server.
When I was younger, I’d save my lunch money for weeks to buy a game and fast during school. I’d do my best to fill my stomach with as much water as I could.
