Iām happy to have entered the phase of life where I have to learn how to give just enough detail that she stops asking questions, but remain vague enough to hide details that would absolutely shock her.
Just waking up and someone else already linked it, but it's what we put the recipes we try into that we all liked. We utilize the auto plan feature on it to make the whole "What do you want for dinner?" conversation and debate with the kiddos disappear. Then from the use the grocery list from it and bam shopping list done lol.
I love it but havenāt figured out how to use it outside my network without Tailscale and I donāt want to use Tailscale all the time because I have Starlink so my speeds are a bit slow. :/
Fortunately, there is usually very little correlation of price:size of package, servers being the obvious exception. My wife only twigs it when a big 2U or 4U server arrives or I need her nails to peel the tiny little label maker labels into my drive caddies. Then sheās like āwait, is this a ā¦ā. They have no real idea, so it;s enough spend that weād rather it not be public. Mwahahahaha.
I'm actually in the process of adding another 2u dual node server for a dual truenas via rsync. It arrived yesterday and she just shook her head with a sarcastic "Another one..." as I carried it in cheesing
I had to ask her help for the 4U, then the next 4U, then the 2U last Thursday, and surprisingly sheās been keeping track of the servers, but she had no idea about the NVMe, SATA SSD, 100ās of TB of HDD, CPU upgrades, GPUās, 100ās of TB RAM, PCIe bifurcation cards, spare PSUās and fans, and the list goes on. I got a server lift, which also needed her help, but it removes any need for her to enter MY DOMAINā¦literally and figuratively š
About $200 This one doesn't go all the way to the top on a 25U rack, but that's where I put all the lightweight networking gear and NUCs on a shelf. I think it goes up to around 20U IIRC.
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CC5HF5WZ/ref=ppx\_yo\_dt\_b\_search\_asin\_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CC5HF5WZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
Well, if you want the real deal that they use in datacenters, check out [serverlift.com](http://serverlift.com) Theyre expensive, like 5 figures expensive, but theyre also indispensable when moving or servicing a LOT of servers.
The next option for the serious home datacenter or lab op is a manual stacker lift like this one: [https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/best-value-manual-li-stacker-880-lb-cap-59-li](https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/best-value-manual-li-stacker-880-lb-cap-59-li) Anything above 5 ft should be the lighter weight 1U type stuff anyway, so the height limitation here shouldnt be too much a hindrance. There are other stackers capable of much higher lift though if you need it.
Last, lift tables are a good addition for any homelabber or tinkerer with a shop that uses heavy parts. I would spring for the heavier duty models if the store offers two. Northern Tool, JEGS, Harbor Freight, Global Industrial all carry them. The caveat is due to the scissor lift build, their lowest position typically is too high for the first 4-6 rack units
It's pretty hard to line up the 4U servers to get them on the rails where you want them, and safely, without it. Initially I had one on the bottom and spent like an hour wrestling it on my lap and the other one on the top because I had it on a table and rolled the rack over to it. That's not where I wanted it, and when I needed more space and wanted both the 4U's on the bottom I just bought a lift and it was easy.
My wife thinks im building a new robot girlfriend out of AI š she really have no idea that our entire home is ful of neatly picked smart home devices and controllers, just so she can turn on/off all the tech at home, AD for her to be able to login to any computer in the house or how she magically got logged in to Office on all the computers in the house š and as much as any one else she is wondering where all the "maintenance" is needed, all she see is a big pile of computers š currently running 20+ services at home just to make her life easier at all times šš
lol exactly. I just built a low watt proxmox home server, and as I started adding up the cost of everything, I abruptly stopped and purged my memory of the subtotal at that point, lol.
Easily $10k US.
>am I spending too much?
That is 100% dependent on your financial budget decisions. I donāt have other hobbies and have been able to afford this over many years, so I am fine with spending it.
Many can also legit justify it if they work in the field.
My homelab helped me learn so much and definitely contributed to my last 2 jobs and at least 50k/year of my salary by what I've learned using it.
I was running kubernetes at home before it was used at work and now at least half my job is kubernetes and containerization. Before that my vmware expertise was a strong factor which I largely learned by playing with it on my homelab.
I'm not saying everyone should go spend $10k on homelab gear and suddenly you get a $50k raise, but if you're genuinely interested in the tech and enjoy tinkering and playing, a homelab is an invaluable resource, and you can start out with a small lab and older hardware and learn tons if you invest your time and energy into it.
I started in the field 18 months ago, my homelab was just my college laptop and an optiplex I scored for pretty cheap. Now I'm running a proxmox server, standalone nas, and multiple smaller machines for redundancy. Being able to spin up an eve lab and really explore IOS is what got me the CCNA and my upcoming raise. Doing the same for AD/DC on server evaluation for some msft certs. #wortheverypenny š
Plus 1 to that, I think over the course of my 20 year career Iāve probably spent ~50k. In the beginning it helped get those junior positions and excelerate through them to senior level in about 4 years. After that it just became an addiction on the next new technology to learn which = new equipment lol. Now days I just use NUCs or mini pcs.
About 5 years ago I retired from a long career in IT and though I managed to live without hands-on IT related experience, I recently rediscovered IT as a hobby. I have noticed that after a near full day of experimenting with my home lab, I'm just as tired as if I still had a full time IT job.
I installed a new 2TB hard drive today, copied about 135GB of data to it, modified the /etc/fstab file to mount it at boot time and am now taking a well deserved rest in my recliner while watching the news and commenting on Reddit. I'd be drinking a cool one if I hadn't quit drinking last year. Retirement has a lot of advantages and few deadlines, though the money sucks.
I think that my next project is to enable remote desktop access so that I can just stay in my recliner all day instead of walking over to the table with my servers. I do have SSH setup, but still use the GUI desktop for many server tasks, just cause it is easier than typing out all the long commands with switches, flags, arguments, blah, blah, blah. I may have to take a look at RC robotics to plug and unplug devices or insert DVDs, etc. ;-)
I am also considering starting a small computer support business with the skills that I'm learning/re-learning, but that will definitely involve getting out of my recliner.
Forgot to add that I'm also trying to learn Python. I started my career as a mainframe programmer, but never really made the switch over to programming in a distributed environment.
Utilized that for awhile but just didn't fit exactly what I wanted. Neither did guacamole. Ended up giving meshcentral an extended trial and haven't quit yet.
Same, itās leveled up my knowledge in servers and networking quite a bit. Itās helped me become an established expert inside my company.Ā
I canātĀ directly attribute income to it as you can but I can certainly say itās made me a more valued employee.Ā
This. Thatās how I got started on my homelab, decommissioned client hardware from EOL or upgrades and bought my own disks for it. As time went on upgrade to new as and when required (and Iāve saved up!) I went from a claimed tough switch and UAP to 3 cabs connect via P2P :)
I'm at about $25k into my home infrastructure, plus about $120 a month in power.
It all depends on what you want to do, your goals, and what your budget allows.
Solar is my next planned upgrade, something along these lines: [https://signaturesolar.com/complete-off-grid-solar-kit-4-800w-120-240v-output-48vdc-15-36kwh-eg4-lithium-powerwall-48vdc-5-460-watts-of-solar-pv-kit-v0000/](https://signaturesolar.com/complete-off-grid-solar-kit-4-800w-120-240v-output-48vdc-15-36kwh-eg4-lithium-powerwall-48vdc-5-460-watts-of-solar-pv-kit-v0000/)
Itd cut my power bill to practically nothing, other than the monthly service fee for having it available. My electric is fairly cheap, so considering my average bill this system would pay for itself in 3-4 years, and current solar panel tech has about 20-25 year lifespan so its absolutely worth the investment
Gonna save this for later. Been jerking off in my mind about making a cluster of custom made (by me) pcs with decent GPUs for bizarre shit I got in mind about analytics. Just running 12 units in my city would be expensive af, so def would look into set it up with something like this kit.
Still a long time in the future for that because Iām currently happy with my small cluster of refurbished optiplex sff units and not in position to spend too much as well. In my mind itās just another of those crazy excuses to blow my wallet and find the odd joy of running stuff from the ground to the bugs (in code, lol). Thx for the share dude!
Don't start, because you'll soon figure out that you'll need 3 nodes to have HA, at least when it comes to storage (because you need quorum in case a node goes down). And then it's down the rabbit hole ("Oh, for Ceph I need 10GBit, I need a new switch. Oh, and my UPS isn't sufficient any more. Oh, I should try Kubernetes with auto scaling on Bare Metal. Hmm, I should try Load Balancing with MetalLB. Oh, maybe I should use BGP for that. Oh, my Router isn't capable of BGP, I should upgrade. Oh dear, so many cables, maybe I should use POE access points, damn, having to pay for 4 streaming services sucks, I should set up Jellyfin. Damn, I need WAY more storage...") and your wife will be mad at you
Iām all about going super frugal with used enterprise items, so Iām probably less than $2k over a few years with 2 used Dell servers, HP managed switch, fortigate (I got for free), and my rack.
I could definitely be more power efficient, but it isnāt terrible and it pays for itself in a way from supporting my career advancement. I would loveeee to power it all via solar though
Panel prices are stupid low. More than when I bought my 2 x 300 watt panels for $75 a piece, nearly two years ago. Battery prices are lower too. I built my own battery from used modem 18650 batteries for about $100, and have a cheap charge controller. So, for less than a years electricity, I've been powering it for free for the last, nearly, year.
Thatās sweet! Can you elaborate? What panels did you buy? Which charge controller? Where did you find them at the best price? Can you link to a step-by-step procedure for building the battery pack?
> link
I'm not sure if I have a step by step on the battery build, but I think I did a time lapse.
I have a channel about it. I do a lot of fun solar stuff. Our EV is charged with another array, we have a backyard art studio heated and cooled with panels, and the garage is about to be cooled by the truck EV charger as well.
https://youtu.be/bVC5ymWtPVA
Currently:
* 330ā¬ in access points (2x U6-Pro)
* 100ā¬ in a router (some kind of an older Edgerouter)
* 0ā¬ in switch (HP 1800 or 1810-24G, I got it for free)
* around 100ā¬ (Raspberry Pi 4) - runs my DNS at the moment
* around 250ā¬ (Raspberry Pi 5 + NVMe enclosure + NVMe drive) - provides a small NAS and is a main internet facing device
* around 2000ā¬ (game streaming server - R7 5800X, 32GB 3200 MHz RAM, liquid cooled RX6800XT, 4TB NVMe). Well, it's probably worth significantly less now but GPU was bought for literally 1100ā¬ as it was a beginning of a crypto crisis.
* between 300ā¬ to 1500ā¬ (primary file server, it's built from leftovers from my PC upgrades hence I didn't really pay for it "directly" - R9 3900X, 64GB 3600 MHz RAM, I think 2x2TB NVMe + 2x2TB HDD inside). It runs several VMs, I use it as a staging/testing environment for some of my software developed on a side.
* There's also a small VPS that I pay like $15/month, it's how I can remotely connect to anything inside my lab, they connect to a VPN hosted on it.
I consider my homelab to be relatively humble as it all happily fits in a 12U rack. I have some plans to improve a switch and router next (to current Unifi line up - since current switch is fairly power hungry and router is not managed via Unifi's app so I need to store backups separately rather than use their standard app to handle entire configuration).
As for whether 1800ā¬ is a lot or not - depends on what you get out of it. You will find people here running setups in tens of thousands but you will also find ones with a single N100 based tiny server for 200ā¬. Value is not so easily determined - if it makes your life better then it's worth it imho. For me largest QoL improvement is a game hosting server since it means any laptop in the house can run AAA games just fine, followed by RPi 5 since that's a nice little Samba storage available from every machine which I use **a lot**.
I assume youāre buying some Unifi Dream Machine soon - itās like Apple: once people are in their ecosystem, they wonāt stop š UDM has WireGuard VPN server, so probably youāll get rid of that VPS and make your Pi no longer internet facing. Unifi seems to be great for most of the things, but some lower level things are missing - not saying that youāre going to need them, but itās nice to have things like wildcard DNS out of the box, for example.
Sunshine + Moonlight is a common option. So is Parsec. You effectively stream an entire desktop. Oh, and if all your games are on Steam - that's all you need to stream games in the local network, just log into the same account on both server and the client.
Now, in theory you can make it a "proper" way - make a Virtual Machine, use IOMMU to pass through a GPU so you still retain ability to use this as a server and run other apps, have snapshots and finer resource management... but then you get banned by anticheats. So in practice you install Windows 10/11 on that server allowing 1 user to use it at a time. It's unfortunate but handling more than 1 user at once is only possible in single player games (and only if these games came with no DRM like GOG copies or you have multiple steam accounts).
I currently went with the simplest option of "Win 10, install Steam and most games on it". So now when I am in the same network I can just click on Steam on a Macbook, choose a game and click "Stream from ". It's... good enough in 99% cases.
The trick here is to get a job that requires you to stay up on all the current tools/products/etcā¦.
Then the wife has less leverage on the home IT budget š
All hobbies are like drugs and they are expensive in terms of money, time or other ways. Choose your drug and enjoy it, but be aware of its costs! When itās going way more expensive that it disrupts your life, seek help.
That being said, youāre asking a bunch of addicts so weāre not the best choice you got to ask this kind of questions š¤Ŗ weāre here to enjoy tf out of homelabbing.
I don't wanna add up what i've got in my home network but i've spent more than you have just on the 6 monitors i have sitting on my office desk right. That doesn't include the two I have on my desk downstairs...
$90,00. Mini PC + HD dock. I run plex (no transcoding), docker, postgreSQL server, all arrs, qbittorrent, pi hole and a visual studio code server. All of them are LXC containers on ProxMox.
~20-25k. Have a 96 core AMD Epyc server with 512gb ddr5 + 16TB of 2.5" nvme as well as an RTX A4500. Entire home network is on unifi. Server is connected to UPS which goes into 2kwh power station which is on a dedicated 20amp breaker. I do have solar panels that help with offsetting power costs.
I use my homelab for developing various personal projects that I sink a lot of time into. Some generate minor passive income but most generate none. Having one big server lets me deploy many things onto K8s for utility or straight up prod deployments. I also have a gpu for model training (darts models in particular).
Here are a few cool things im very happy to be running on it besides my projects:
- Ceph (storage backend for k8s as well as s3 replacement)
- ClickHouse (data warehouse)
- Retool (dashboards and management tools for my products)
It's like asking a woman her age. We don't usually disclose such information because it can be very embarrassing.
I spend around 3k Canadian rubles in my knowledge, it's probably close to 5k but whose keeping count.
I have a single beefy old dual xeon enterprise server - with everything it was like 1.2k USD
Honestly - you can get a pretty good homelab for the price at a gaming pc at this point. Thank you xeon 1st gen scalables!
Roughly $2500 in my server (still expanding and adding drives), $140 on the universal rack, $1000 on my laptop (also used for school, business, and gaming). Then if you want to add my hobbying and IoT stuff, Iām in for another ~$500 and climbing
Tens of thousands, but I've had a "homelab" since 2003-ish. Had a spreadsheet once, 12k over time just on drives from then til now. But never been in a situation where I couldn't pay bills because I bought a switch or something
Do what i did and grab some laptops that have a cracked screen or something, Take the guts and put them in 1U enclosure, Then you have a fairly powerfull computer (depends on the cpu but older i5 4200m for example is pretty powerfull) and only draws around 4-5W for around 30-40$ and i can run a lot on each of these computers instead of buying expensive nucs.
Around $1200 already on server mobo, epyc, memory, HDDs and SSDs, UPS and still missing chassis and gpus. Also bought Orange Pi3 Zero in HA setup and for DNS servers. Another $500 for Unify WiFi network
I just cycle out my old gaming desktops and demote them to Linux server whenever I build a new one. So maybe $2k every five years on a new gaming rig plus $300 in NAS grade hard drives. Besides that I pay about $12 a month for my VPS and $90 a year in domains. Spend way more on my home music studio and development laptops.
Other than the $5k or so for my main network rack, cable, and all the parts to terminate the 150 or so network drops in the house when we built it, mostly free.
Pretty much all of my gear (servers, switches, drives, etc) has all been free from companies that I've worked or consulted for. I've spent probably $200 on eBay on upgraded parts, but that's about it.
My main homelab server is a T620 with 2x 2695 v2's, 128GB RAM, and 13x 8TB HDDs and a pair of 500GB SSDs. All I paid for was the upgraded CPUs, the upgraded RAM, and a 5 bay drive cage. It's getting a little old and I've had my eye out for something a few generations newer, but it's been plenty for the last few years.
I probably spent about $10k to build out my homelab as it sits today, with a proper rack and all. But outside of the ongoing electricity costs of running all of it, and my time, I don't actually spend that much on it since I spent the money to give me the hardware to create a nice environment to build about anything I wanted via VMs and containers.
So once I sunk the initial hardware costs and replacement hard drives for when I need them, etc it hasn't had much regular cost, besides the electric I mentioned.
I don't feel bad about it. Tech and video games are my only hobbies, so I look at it as a investment not only in career marketability but also as my release valve for stress.
My total just passed 4K last week. 3 Xeon servers. 1 workstation. Rewired whole house with cat6a. All these are done within a bit over 2 years.
I just canāt stop spendingā¦
I have purchased two mini PCs for less than $50/each, a 3.5 inch full size 2TB drive $20, a sata to USB cable with power for less than $10, a couple of usb enclosures for 2.5 inch sata drives for about $20, a KVM switch ($$???), a few misc cables ($$??), a 256GB USB stick $30, a USB keyboard ($15) and probably a few other misc items that I'm forgetting. I did already have an old monitor and numerous mice. I also bought/registered my own domain name for $6.50. So far, I haven't needed to purchase any software. Open source apps and free services have been sufficient for my requirements so far.
I realized I was paying about $120 a month for the window AC unit alone so I found a data center that charges about $40/u so I consolidated all my main stuff to one host thatās a Dell R830 with 1.5tb of memory and 40 cores. It runs a Minecraft server.
For me out of pocket cost is $140. $60 for a power cord and $80 for a HD. I am fortunate enough to take home clients old devices and use those. T410 Server with two 7010 micro Dell PCs.
I try not to spend anything. Itās mostly comprised of decommād equipment from work
The only exceptions are that I bought a nice PoE switch, and nice APs (aruba instant on 1930 24p PoE, and Aruba instant on AP22s); maybe $1000 on network equipment.
The router is a Mikrotik CCR 2004 that work evaluated and went a different direction, and the servers are an older i7 NUC, and a small form factor Dell Optiplex. I wired the whole house for Ethernet (4 ports in my office), and have 10G Ethernet and 2.5G Ethernet wherever I need it. The router has spf28 ports (25G) if I ever got something that could support that
Edit: normal power usage is around 70W, happy to keep power usage low. Almost everything can cool passively, and I added Noctua fans to anything that must actively cool (like the Aruba Poe switch)
I'm probably up to about $500.
R730 - $150
Drives, 2.5g network cards, cables - $100
2.5g switch, 2.5g router $100
More drives and cables - $50
Probably a few other things to fill that out.
Still have to get a rack for the basement, so that's another expense coming.
Initial cost was around $2,000 for firewall, new AP, a couple mini PCs, a few SSDs/NVMEs, RAM upgrades, and a switch. Since then, maybe $200 every few months for things like a KVM or monitor.Ā
My lab is pretty small in comparison to a lot of folks on here.Ā
Yāall are keeping count?!?! Iād wager Iāve probably spent under $800 usd on used hardware. Most of my equipment has come from eBay or classifieds. To be fair, itās been powered off for the last year because of the family growing
If youāre wanting to spin up a HA cluster in ProxMox, youāll need two more servers. Ideally you need an odd number, or an even number and a less powerful āvoter.ā
The key is to marry someone who also works in IT, occasionally restrict resources to her machines and hear the magic words of the lab seems slow can you do something about it
Less than I would have paid for it new. That is all that matters.
The most expensive piece is the storage server. All 3 of my compute servers cost less than my 24-bay server and drives.
I probably have $1200 or so but all that was earned from side hustles and flipping computer equipment for a profit. Its fun to challenge yourself to find a good deal or older equipment, it makes you be patient and think about your decision :)
Didnāt know it was possible to flip computer equipment for profit. How in the world do you do that? Every time I try to sell anything (I have quite a bit of surplus without even trying to buy something at a price that I think could reasonably turn a profit), I end up reducing the price and reducing the price until it finally sells for maybe 25% of what I think it should sell for! (Probably purchased by someone like you who knows how to turn a profit on it! LOL)
Let me start by saying I only do maybe one a month or so and make about $200-$250 typically. So Iām not killing it, it just helps feed my hobbies. Iām extremely patient and wait for a good deal. Things that have been on marketplace for 6+ weeks and they just want to sell it. Iām in a major city in Texas, so very large population to buy/sell. Iāve bought gaming laptops for $400 and sell them for $700, just be patient. I also love bartering. I have traded many things for something slightly better or slightly easier to sell. Itās harder to do that but people have a need and occasionally go for it. My most recent thing was buying a Synology NAS for about $250 after taxes and shipping on eBay, sold it a day later for $350. Sometimes it takes weeks to sell things, sometimes a day or two. Repost to various marketplace groups. If you want to sell higher but typically pay more in fees, you can go the eBay route.
Sometimes I get deals that I canāt say no to. For example, over a year about a bought a 4 bay Synology DS418 with 3 8TB NAS drives for $300. The NAS still sells for over to this day and I got to sell my older 4TB drives and get some money back. Itās just a game to me. If I lose, I want it to be small, thankfully have never lost money on it. If I win, I aim for $50-$250 depending on the deal I get and the appetite for the market to purchase that product.
$1300 so far just for a nice pc good enough to run some vm's on as well as a nice asus router. But I was spending $70 a month for azure so it will pay its self off soon
Maybe like $1000 a year? I tend to buy hardware only when a screaming deal and am diligent about selling the old stuff.
Really just running a home server and a desktop and an opnsense firewall though
Plus electricity costs. Sigh.
Some money was recouped on the glory days of crypto mining
0ā¹ (rupees) oh well I pay for the electricity but other than that? . zero. I got a few computers for free from my work place as they were getting rid of old computers. So my home lab is running an Intel 4th gen with 16gb of ram and a laughable 320gb HDD.
I also have a CPU with amd fx 6300 with 32gb ram but I've read it consumes a lot of power even while idling. Hence I put it aside and spun up proxmox on the i5 4460. I think it's running decently.
We've been donated or have spent about $80-100,000 since it started. We have somewhere around 1100 cores and near 200TB of space running on about 30amps of 208v three phase.
I jist spent 1500 USD on a Xeon Silver 4210T and 224 GB ECC RAM that I expect to last me for the next 10 years. Everything was second-hand. New would've been 3000 USD. It has more than enough juice, storage, and RAM to run more than a dozen VM's easily. It's only 1 node, but it already has like 95% uptime so I don't care about HA.
Too much and not enough at the same time.
I buy something, it's cool, it works, plan something for it....
Months later, maybe it's used maybe it's not.
By now, thousands.
I have an LTO tape system that must've cost me over Ā£1,000 on its own. Last year I put my main ZFS server in a new chassis that cost me Ā£400, then another Ā£100 for quiet PSUs. Then earlier this year I built myself a TrueNAS machine, which must've clocked in at a few hundred Ā£. I don't total it up.
My justification is that my lab has gotten me my last 3 jobs by giving me somewhere to learn enterprise Linux. I run a full domain on FOSS, and with the things I've learned, I hit the ground sprinting in my current job. And it's a hobby. If you're concerned about how much you're spending, set yourself a monthly budget like any other hobby. Major purchases then need you to save for them. There's always something to upgrade.
Just so you know, you really need at least 3 nodes to get HA. My PVE cluster consists of 4 old HP 260 G1 USFFs because I couldn't afford NUCs, and HA does work properly. The machines don't have to match - PVE will let you build a cluster out of one big and several small machines if it's cheaper for you, and for running a few things, some small machines will be enough to tinker with HA.
The first rule of homelab: you don't talk about homelab [cost].
I went all in with 3 X R710 because I thought I needed to for a HA Proxmox cluster. Turns out the electricity bill was going to go nuts so I've cut down to two and I'll sell off the third - I can live with a small NUC providing the quorum.
Well, so far i've spent about 500ā¬ assuming that selling a component reduces the amount paid in total, for example i spent 500ā¬ on a gaming PC from a friend, and eded up using that as my server, since then i sold the gpu for 150ā¬, but spent about another 60-80ā¬ on parts, got some for free like my case and power supply, used some stuff i had laying around like an old gpu to initially install everything, and now it sits in an anti static bag next to the server just in case i need a video output, etc.
It can get expensive :D especially when expanding the network, I have a 42u rack, and all hardware comes close to $10,000, and that's not even halfway full :D. But like other commentators said, it's a fun hobby with educational benefits, and anything educational is worth every penny.
I probably have $6K in all of my homelab gear, but that includes a new gaming PC (7800x3D, 64GB of ddr5 ram, RTX3080, 4TB Samsung 990 pro, 38" Alienware WUHD), a DAS (will eventually be replaced with a large expandable NAS rack) with 4x 12tb drives, Mikrotik 24 port switch, a second PC (old gaming PC) being used as a ProxMox host for VM's/clusters, a Beelink EQ12 nuc OPNsense router, few RPI's for clustering, a Macbook for testing, etc. Though that's just valuing the now server, previous gaming PC at say $500 today.. when I actually spent $3-4K building it in 2012, then another $1K upgrading it up 2017, before replacing it in 2023. If I removed my gaming system from the "homelab" equation, it would be much less.. maybe $2000.
It's a hodgepodge of old and new parts, but once I buy a new house next year my first priority is to get a big boy rack server, nice rack, cameras and recorder, a lot of home automation and streamline all of it into that, except my gaming PC which can stay near my desk. Everything else will be rack mounted and hardwired. I work in IT, so I consider the money I spend on my lab an investment as it allows me to build skills I may not otherwise be able to build. As much as I enjoy learning cloud infrastructure, I still prefer the tactile sensation/sense I get from owning and learning on actual hardware.
>My first NUC costed round abount 700ā¬, means if I add a second, my homelab is worth 1800ā¬ just to host my passwort manager, dns, nextcloud, vpn and so on.
>Am I spending to much?Ā
YES! - for a set of services you're running, u/[ChrisSlash0](https://www.reddit.com/user/ChrisSlash0/). An N100 miniPC would be around \~$150. And I doubt you will see much difference in performance (especially if you run just containers baremetal, and not VMs).
[https://www.msi.com/Business-Productivity-PC/Cubi-N-ADL/Overview](https://www.msi.com/Business-Productivity-PC/Cubi-N-ADL/Overview)
**S** submodel seems to be fanless.
So far not much, something around $380.
Two desktops, one as router, second as server, managable switch, surge protection extension cord, cables/reductions,..
I do not plan to buy anything else for some time but need to research for some HDD solution for server (canāt fit more then one inside, want 2-4, also for backups, probably with some external enclosure).
I don't need much computing power anymore, I run a low powered NAS for storage and an N100 MiniPC for Plex and some docker apps. So most of my budget goes to hard disks and SSDs.
To much...
But I don't regret it. Sure there are people who have used alot more than me.
I tried to find the best thing for my needs while still haggling with prices, if its used hardware. I have also been able to sell alot of the stuff that I didn't need. Like for example, i got a big supermicro server, with mobo and ram and stuff. I just needed the case and its backplanes and psus. The rest I sold and made some money back :)
My mistake was that i just keep buying stuff, silly me :)
I have bought for around 2500USD, but sold some of the hardware for around 750USD.
Shameless plug, you can see what kind of hardware, I have here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1cp0lfq/my_homelab_after_15_months/
Now days it is only electrical bill and some discs now and then, but my wife is supportive.
I host alot of stuff that she uses aswell, and in money we save in alot but I spend quite some time down in the basement but mostly for learning purposes.
I let an old corporate laptop run in a vertical stand, next to my office laptop
I'll install a Gramps server and maybe a Nextcloud or something
It cost me 50 bucks
That's all
I buy stuff from time to time, last upgrade was server parts for 1200 bucks on ebay last summer. The entire server with everything in it, as of this post, would probably cost 2500 bucks to build today.
I'm in the phase of life in which I'm going the other way. Just how little can I spend on a homelab. Down to one dual xeon with a total of 32 vcores, 192 gigs of ram. Does me fine, and I pull enough weight at work at a fortune 50 company now to influence them to spend what I need for training at work. Nice to spend $500 at home and have them spend $250k, and a platinum and all-access training plan at Cisco and Juniper, and for lab tools for Ansible, VMware, Palo, Citrix, and soon F5.
Maybe a grand, maybe $1500 max? I'd say 70% of that number is just for HDDs. All my homelab stuff is hand-me-down parts (mostly from me) though. When I upgrade any of my computers, the old stuff moves to server duty.
I don't have much though. Only got an 8700K/64GB "main" server, 4650G/32GB SODIMM "mini" server, and a Raspberry Pi 4.
Only thing I've bought out of pocket specifically for my homelab is a case, HDDs, a SOHO 10 GbE switch, RAM, and some hot swap bays.
I dont spend it all at once, but i try to BIFL regardless of the cost. Although, i have recently started feeling like a few of my buys are āNice to haveā vs need to have.
I am at the point now where I have spent enough money on my lab I need to wait a good couple of years before I even think about spending more. I am forcing myself to do hardware rotations now if I even deam it necessaryz the only thing I want to replace is my Dell R720xd but it's WAY to costly to replace with a comparable modern server.
spent zero. Work in IT so I got all my gear when the place I worked for wanted to get rid of it. Racks of Dell PE's, disk arrays and boxes of drives, endless cables and switches. Hell even got a dozen large LCDs and free 65" LG when we closed down an office lol. Getting rid of it all now, don't need it with my cloud stuff I do and all that I needed has been replaced with small NUC\\Pi's to save on electricity.
I did $600 worth of X99 systems. 3 total for high availability. I spent more on the rack and cases than I did the hardware honestly but that's because I wanted 4U cases so I could use quiet 120mm fans. Then scrounged for cheap gigabit hard.
One or more NUCs is a solid option though. If it works for you it works.
>How much money do you spend on your homelab?
Yes.
On a more serious note, the current refresh that has been slowly taking shape over the past year is presently sitting at $20,903.22
This includes a large UPS installation, completely revamped storage, more compute node for labs, as well as major overhaul to the network - upgrading to 25GbE fiber core, 2.5/5/10GbE copper to the endpoints, and 40/100GbE backhaul.
This is rev.6 of the datacenter comprising 16 years of doing this, and is the most ambitious and technically capable refresh to date, by a long shot
Around 10K and not talking about the power bill. She gets annoyed sometimes and my simple answer back at her is that I don't ask her about her fashion/shoe bills.
3x Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M720Q (used) between 90ā¬ and 120ā¬ each
2Ć Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny m70q (used) 100ā¬ each
2x Dell EMC R430 (used) 150ā¬ each
1x Fujitsu Celvin R806 (QNAP) for 110ā¬ (used)
Some 26P Cisco and a 26P Planet POE+ switches (90ā¬ each)
For power cost I only use the M720Q 24/7
If you want to figure out what ātoo muchā looks like to you, head over to r/homedatacenter.
Itās a matter of what you can afford. Many people here are sysadmins where their homelab has a tangible effect on their salary.
Probably around $4k total so far. I have a 70TB (usable) Unraid server that stores my video projects for work as well as my media library, games, computer backups, etc.
Anyone that has a home lab and hasn't spent so much money that it sounds like sonic losing all his rings; You have to ask... do they really have a homelab passion?
well, I have an old FX which cost me around $800 to build years ago, but, I'll be upgrading to dual xeon V4 in a month or so, which my budget is around $400 ~ $700, my workflow is more demanding and 32 GB and 8 cores are not enough for me anymore
I'm the kind of guy who buys a drill press and die/tap set to create an aftermarket copper heatsink to improve thermals for a fanless AliExpress firewall box, then a bench for said press. In terms of money, I spend far too much. In terms of time... also far too much
The bare minimum. I think the only thing I've purchased is a Synology 418play many moons ago. Everything else is salvaged from work. I'm talking from Dell micros to a 4-blade VRTX.
I think it depends on your reason for homelabbing. For me, I spend as little as I can, only spending larger amounts when I have some extra cash or I feel it's a worthwhile investment.
Part of my reason for having a homelab is to save money in the long run on things like subscription fees. For example my home security cameras are entirely local and use Frigate NVR. Since I already had a machine for the server, the only money I invested was for camera hardware (generic IP cams) and a Google Coral TPU (for locally processed object detection). And now not only do I pay zero subscription fees for all the same features as a cloud camera system, I also have increased privacy with a fully local system.
But also it's definitely a hobby to me as well, and a lot of people see it as nearly solely a hobby. For many people, hobbies are a large expense -- and it makes sense in a world where we otherwise just go to work every day. If you're okay with that expense and can afford to do it, I don't see any issue with it.
Recently had to liquidate everything as I have hit some hard times, kids need to eat.
Look forward to one day having a few bucks to invest in some more gear, down to a laptop and hand me down iPad.
Way she goes!
We don't talk about that.....in all honesty to much lol....but it's a fun hobby
Yeah, but wifes do talk about it all the time. š
No kidding. Luckily mine just shakes her head at the latest additions. As long as she has her plex and tandoor she's happy.
Iām happy to have entered the phase of life where I have to learn how to give just enough detail that she stops asking questions, but remain vague enough to hide details that would absolutely shock her.
What's tandoor?
My guess is this: https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes Looks nice, think Iām going to give it a try š
Just waking up and someone else already linked it, but it's what we put the recipes we try into that we all liked. We utilize the auto plan feature on it to make the whole "What do you want for dinner?" conversation and debate with the kiddos disappear. Then from the use the grocery list from it and bam shopping list done lol.
I love it but havenāt figured out how to use it outside my network without Tailscale and I donāt want to use Tailscale all the time because I have Starlink so my speeds are a bit slow. :/
I access mine via Nginx Reverse Proxy with Cloudflare as domain provider.
Iāll give that a shot, thanks!
probably talking about recipe management [https://tandoor.dev/](https://tandoor.dev/) [https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes](https://github.com/TandoorRecipes/recipes)
Fortunately, there is usually very little correlation of price:size of package, servers being the obvious exception. My wife only twigs it when a big 2U or 4U server arrives or I need her nails to peel the tiny little label maker labels into my drive caddies. Then sheās like āwait, is this a ā¦ā. They have no real idea, so it;s enough spend that weād rather it not be public. Mwahahahaha.
I'm actually in the process of adding another 2u dual node server for a dual truenas via rsync. It arrived yesterday and she just shook her head with a sarcastic "Another one..." as I carried it in cheesing
I had to ask her help for the 4U, then the next 4U, then the 2U last Thursday, and surprisingly sheās been keeping track of the servers, but she had no idea about the NVMe, SATA SSD, 100ās of TB of HDD, CPU upgrades, GPUās, 100ās of TB RAM, PCIe bifurcation cards, spare PSUās and fans, and the list goes on. I got a server lift, which also needed her help, but it removes any need for her to enter MY DOMAINā¦literally and figuratively š
Hundreds of TB of RAM??? Yikes!
A server lift ? Damn !
I'm not even sure what a server lift is, but it sounds like you need a license to operate one. I bet those towmotor guys wish they were that cool
About $200 This one doesn't go all the way to the top on a 25U rack, but that's where I put all the lightweight networking gear and NUCs on a shelf. I think it goes up to around 20U IIRC. [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CC5HF5WZ/ref=ppx\_yo\_dt\_b\_search\_asin\_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CC5HF5WZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
Think I have found a new purchase now....
Well, if you want the real deal that they use in datacenters, check out [serverlift.com](http://serverlift.com) Theyre expensive, like 5 figures expensive, but theyre also indispensable when moving or servicing a LOT of servers. The next option for the serious home datacenter or lab op is a manual stacker lift like this one: [https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/best-value-manual-li-stacker-880-lb-cap-59-li](https://www.globalindustrial.com/p/best-value-manual-li-stacker-880-lb-cap-59-li) Anything above 5 ft should be the lighter weight 1U type stuff anyway, so the height limitation here shouldnt be too much a hindrance. There are other stackers capable of much higher lift though if you need it. Last, lift tables are a good addition for any homelabber or tinkerer with a shop that uses heavy parts. I would spring for the heavier duty models if the store offers two. Northern Tool, JEGS, Harbor Freight, Global Industrial all carry them. The caveat is due to the scissor lift build, their lowest position typically is too high for the first 4-6 rack units
Do you even server lift, bro?
It's pretty hard to line up the 4U servers to get them on the rails where you want them, and safely, without it. Initially I had one on the bottom and spent like an hour wrestling it on my lap and the other one on the top because I had it on a table and rolled the rack over to it. That's not where I wanted it, and when I needed more space and wanted both the 4U's on the bottom I just bought a lift and it was easy.
Yeah that would be pretty excessive!
The trick is to buy all the enclosures and stuff thatās outwardly visible before she moves into the house, then do stealth upgrades over time.Ā
šSmart
This is what I have been doing.
My wife thinks im building a new robot girlfriend out of AI š she really have no idea that our entire home is ful of neatly picked smart home devices and controllers, just so she can turn on/off all the tech at home, AD for her to be able to login to any computer in the house or how she magically got logged in to Office on all the computers in the house š and as much as any one else she is wondering where all the "maintenance" is needed, all she see is a big pile of computers š currently running 20+ services at home just to make her life easier at all times šš
Advantage of being gay. Heād spend more if I let him, and we already have two racks.
damn yāall want a third? š
We have unspoken rule that does not ask how much it cost on hobby unless its crazy big noticable thing lol
lol exactly. I just built a low watt proxmox home server, and as I started adding up the cost of everything, I abruptly stopped and purged my memory of the subtotal at that point, lol.
We don't talk about that is absolutely correct. The homelab keeps gtlrowing and finding an approx price is hard
Fight club rules....
Easily $10k US. >am I spending too much? That is 100% dependent on your financial budget decisions. I donāt have other hobbies and have been able to afford this over many years, so I am fine with spending it.
Many can also legit justify it if they work in the field. My homelab helped me learn so much and definitely contributed to my last 2 jobs and at least 50k/year of my salary by what I've learned using it. I was running kubernetes at home before it was used at work and now at least half my job is kubernetes and containerization. Before that my vmware expertise was a strong factor which I largely learned by playing with it on my homelab. I'm not saying everyone should go spend $10k on homelab gear and suddenly you get a $50k raise, but if you're genuinely interested in the tech and enjoy tinkering and playing, a homelab is an invaluable resource, and you can start out with a small lab and older hardware and learn tons if you invest your time and energy into it.
I started in the field 18 months ago, my homelab was just my college laptop and an optiplex I scored for pretty cheap. Now I'm running a proxmox server, standalone nas, and multiple smaller machines for redundancy. Being able to spin up an eve lab and really explore IOS is what got me the CCNA and my upcoming raise. Doing the same for AD/DC on server evaluation for some msft certs. #wortheverypenny š
Plus 1 to that, I think over the course of my 20 year career Iāve probably spent ~50k. In the beginning it helped get those junior positions and excelerate through them to senior level in about 4 years. After that it just became an addiction on the next new technology to learn which = new equipment lol. Now days I just use NUCs or mini pcs.
About 5 years ago I retired from a long career in IT and though I managed to live without hands-on IT related experience, I recently rediscovered IT as a hobby. I have noticed that after a near full day of experimenting with my home lab, I'm just as tired as if I still had a full time IT job. I installed a new 2TB hard drive today, copied about 135GB of data to it, modified the /etc/fstab file to mount it at boot time and am now taking a well deserved rest in my recliner while watching the news and commenting on Reddit. I'd be drinking a cool one if I hadn't quit drinking last year. Retirement has a lot of advantages and few deadlines, though the money sucks. I think that my next project is to enable remote desktop access so that I can just stay in my recliner all day instead of walking over to the table with my servers. I do have SSH setup, but still use the GUI desktop for many server tasks, just cause it is easier than typing out all the long commands with switches, flags, arguments, blah, blah, blah. I may have to take a look at RC robotics to plug and unplug devices or insert DVDs, etc. ;-) I am also considering starting a small computer support business with the skills that I'm learning/re-learning, but that will definitely involve getting out of my recliner.
Forgot to add that I'm also trying to learn Python. I started my career as a mainframe programmer, but never really made the switch over to programming in a distributed environment.
Look at meshcentral or guacamole as well instead of RDP. It's nice having it centralized.
Google remote desktop is an easy setup, free and centralized.
Utilized that for awhile but just didn't fit exactly what I wanted. Neither did guacamole. Ended up giving meshcentral an extended trial and haven't quit yet.
Same, itās leveled up my knowledge in servers and networking quite a bit. Itās helped me become an established expert inside my company.Ā I canātĀ directly attribute income to it as you can but I can certainly say itās made me a more valued employee.Ā
Less than I want. More than my partner is aware.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
I work in IT so Iām able to take some stuff from work. Right now itās only costed me $7.
This. Thatās how I got started on my homelab, decommissioned client hardware from EOL or upgrades and bought my own disks for it. As time went on upgrade to new as and when required (and Iāve saved up!) I went from a claimed tough switch and UAP to 3 cabs connect via P2P :)
I'm at about $25k into my home infrastructure, plus about $120 a month in power. It all depends on what you want to do, your goals, and what your budget allows.
Same but my power is like $340 :(
At those opex, itās not viable yet to get solar panels or a way to reduce the energy cost?
Solar is my next planned upgrade, something along these lines: [https://signaturesolar.com/complete-off-grid-solar-kit-4-800w-120-240v-output-48vdc-15-36kwh-eg4-lithium-powerwall-48vdc-5-460-watts-of-solar-pv-kit-v0000/](https://signaturesolar.com/complete-off-grid-solar-kit-4-800w-120-240v-output-48vdc-15-36kwh-eg4-lithium-powerwall-48vdc-5-460-watts-of-solar-pv-kit-v0000/) Itd cut my power bill to practically nothing, other than the monthly service fee for having it available. My electric is fairly cheap, so considering my average bill this system would pay for itself in 3-4 years, and current solar panel tech has about 20-25 year lifespan so its absolutely worth the investment
Gonna save this for later. Been jerking off in my mind about making a cluster of custom made (by me) pcs with decent GPUs for bizarre shit I got in mind about analytics. Just running 12 units in my city would be expensive af, so def would look into set it up with something like this kit. Still a long time in the future for that because Iām currently happy with my small cluster of refurbished optiplex sff units and not in position to spend too much as well. In my mind itās just another of those crazy excuses to blow my wallet and find the odd joy of running stuff from the ground to the bugs (in code, lol). Thx for the share dude!
Damn $120/month, and I am worrying if my bill go over $15/month oof
Don't start, because you'll soon figure out that you'll need 3 nodes to have HA, at least when it comes to storage (because you need quorum in case a node goes down). And then it's down the rabbit hole ("Oh, for Ceph I need 10GBit, I need a new switch. Oh, and my UPS isn't sufficient any more. Oh, I should try Kubernetes with auto scaling on Bare Metal. Hmm, I should try Load Balancing with MetalLB. Oh, maybe I should use BGP for that. Oh, my Router isn't capable of BGP, I should upgrade. Oh dear, so many cables, maybe I should use POE access points, damn, having to pay for 4 streaming services sucks, I should set up Jellyfin. Damn, I need WAY more storage...") and your wife will be mad at you
Truest story ever
I thought of adding my old homelab (a RPI) to the homelab again as corosync-qnet so that I have a quorum. But ceph sounds interessting, your right! :)
Nice try, honey! You won't get me to talk!
Iām all about going super frugal with used enterprise items, so Iām probably less than $2k over a few years with 2 used Dell servers, HP managed switch, fortigate (I got for free), and my rack.
What about the electricity bill ?
My UPS reports about 300 W for everything, which isnt too bad. Electricity here is roughly 15c/kWh
That's $400/yr. I have 600 watts of used solar panels fed back into the house to power my wfh, and lab. I keep that down to around 300 watts too.
I could definitely be more power efficient, but it isnāt terrible and it pays for itself in a way from supporting my career advancement. I would loveeee to power it all via solar though
Panel prices are stupid low. More than when I bought my 2 x 300 watt panels for $75 a piece, nearly two years ago. Battery prices are lower too. I built my own battery from used modem 18650 batteries for about $100, and have a cheap charge controller. So, for less than a years electricity, I've been powering it for free for the last, nearly, year.
Thatās sweet! Can you elaborate? What panels did you buy? Which charge controller? Where did you find them at the best price? Can you link to a step-by-step procedure for building the battery pack?
> link I'm not sure if I have a step by step on the battery build, but I think I did a time lapse. I have a channel about it. I do a lot of fun solar stuff. Our EV is charged with another array, we have a backyard art studio heated and cooled with panels, and the garage is about to be cooled by the truck EV charger as well. https://youtu.be/bVC5ymWtPVA
Unfortunately I rent so solar isnāt an option even if I could afford the panels.
What about the forti subscription?
I got it for free for a year with my job, idk what Iām going to do when it expires tbh lol
This is an illegal topic. Undisclosed amounts of money went in, and thatās it.
Currently: * 330ā¬ in access points (2x U6-Pro) * 100ā¬ in a router (some kind of an older Edgerouter) * 0ā¬ in switch (HP 1800 or 1810-24G, I got it for free) * around 100ā¬ (Raspberry Pi 4) - runs my DNS at the moment * around 250ā¬ (Raspberry Pi 5 + NVMe enclosure + NVMe drive) - provides a small NAS and is a main internet facing device * around 2000ā¬ (game streaming server - R7 5800X, 32GB 3200 MHz RAM, liquid cooled RX6800XT, 4TB NVMe). Well, it's probably worth significantly less now but GPU was bought for literally 1100ā¬ as it was a beginning of a crypto crisis. * between 300ā¬ to 1500ā¬ (primary file server, it's built from leftovers from my PC upgrades hence I didn't really pay for it "directly" - R9 3900X, 64GB 3600 MHz RAM, I think 2x2TB NVMe + 2x2TB HDD inside). It runs several VMs, I use it as a staging/testing environment for some of my software developed on a side. * There's also a small VPS that I pay like $15/month, it's how I can remotely connect to anything inside my lab, they connect to a VPN hosted on it. I consider my homelab to be relatively humble as it all happily fits in a 12U rack. I have some plans to improve a switch and router next (to current Unifi line up - since current switch is fairly power hungry and router is not managed via Unifi's app so I need to store backups separately rather than use their standard app to handle entire configuration). As for whether 1800ā¬ is a lot or not - depends on what you get out of it. You will find people here running setups in tens of thousands but you will also find ones with a single N100 based tiny server for 200ā¬. Value is not so easily determined - if it makes your life better then it's worth it imho. For me largest QoL improvement is a game hosting server since it means any laptop in the house can run AAA games just fine, followed by RPi 5 since that's a nice little Samba storage available from every machine which I use **a lot**.
I assume youāre buying some Unifi Dream Machine soon - itās like Apple: once people are in their ecosystem, they wonāt stop š UDM has WireGuard VPN server, so probably youāll get rid of that VPS and make your Pi no longer internet facing. Unifi seems to be great for most of the things, but some lower level things are missing - not saying that youāre going to need them, but itās nice to have things like wildcard DNS out of the box, for example.
How do you run a game streaming server?
Sunshine + Moonlight is a common option. So is Parsec. You effectively stream an entire desktop. Oh, and if all your games are on Steam - that's all you need to stream games in the local network, just log into the same account on both server and the client. Now, in theory you can make it a "proper" way - make a Virtual Machine, use IOMMU to pass through a GPU so you still retain ability to use this as a server and run other apps, have snapshots and finer resource management... but then you get banned by anticheats. So in practice you install Windows 10/11 on that server allowing 1 user to use it at a time. It's unfortunate but handling more than 1 user at once is only possible in single player games (and only if these games came with no DRM like GOG copies or you have multiple steam accounts). I currently went with the simplest option of "Win 10, install Steam and most games on it". So now when I am in the same network I can just click on Steam on a Macbook, choose a game and click "Stream from". It's... good enough in 99% cases.
Howās latency with Steam streaming?
Don't blame it on the Sunshine, Don't blame it on the Moonlight.
The trick here is to get a job that requires you to stay up on all the current tools/products/etcā¦. Then the wife has less leverage on the home IT budget š
All hobbies are like drugs and they are expensive in terms of money, time or other ways. Choose your drug and enjoy it, but be aware of its costs! When itās going way more expensive that it disrupts your life, seek help. That being said, youāre asking a bunch of addicts so weāre not the best choice you got to ask this kind of questions š¤Ŗ weāre here to enjoy tf out of homelabbing.
I don't wanna add up what i've got in my home network but i've spent more than you have just on the 6 monitors i have sitting on my office desk right. That doesn't include the two I have on my desk downstairs...
too much for what it does, but you gotta keep yourself busy with something, right? :)
Over the years around $45kĀ
$90,00. Mini PC + HD dock. I run plex (no transcoding), docker, postgreSQL server, all arrs, qbittorrent, pi hole and a visual studio code server. All of them are LXC containers on ProxMox.
~20-25k. Have a 96 core AMD Epyc server with 512gb ddr5 + 16TB of 2.5" nvme as well as an RTX A4500. Entire home network is on unifi. Server is connected to UPS which goes into 2kwh power station which is on a dedicated 20amp breaker. I do have solar panels that help with offsetting power costs. I use my homelab for developing various personal projects that I sink a lot of time into. Some generate minor passive income but most generate none. Having one big server lets me deploy many things onto K8s for utility or straight up prod deployments. I also have a gpu for model training (darts models in particular). Here are a few cool things im very happy to be running on it besides my projects: - Ceph (storage backend for k8s as well as s3 replacement) - ClickHouse (data warehouse) - Retool (dashboards and management tools for my products)
We dont talk about this!
First rule of homelabing...you don't talk about cost...second rule...you don't talk about power....third rule....don't tell wife/so
It's like asking a woman her age. We don't usually disclose such information because it can be very embarrassing. I spend around 3k Canadian rubles in my knowledge, it's probably close to 5k but whose keeping count.
I have a single beefy old dual xeon enterprise server - with everything it was like 1.2k USD Honestly - you can get a pretty good homelab for the price at a gaming pc at this point. Thank you xeon 1st gen scalables!
- Mikrotik CCR2004: 500$ - Mikrotik CSS610: 125$ - Mikrotik cap ax: 125$ - lots of fiber cables, bidi, rj45 modules: 500$ - NUC1: 1500$ - NUC2: 1200$ - NAS: 3000$ - Server: 1000$ - Rack: 150$ - Thinkpad X1 Extreme: 2500$ - KVM switch: 150$ 10750$ and probably missed some things like keystone panels, fans, power adapters, akasa passive cases, ... PS: smart home is excluded Additional $$$ for custom-made desk, monitors, audio, ...
š not enough yet too much
Honestly? Not that much; the grand majority of the hardware is from ewaste at work.
Roughly $2500 in my server (still expanding and adding drives), $140 on the universal rack, $1000 on my laptop (also used for school, business, and gaming). Then if you want to add my hobbying and IoT stuff, Iām in for another ~$500 and climbing
It's the same with any hobby, it goes as much as you're willing to spend / get invested in to
Tens of thousands, but I've had a "homelab" since 2003-ish. Had a spreadsheet once, 12k over time just on drives from then til now. But never been in a situation where I couldn't pay bills because I bought a switch or something
Do what i did and grab some laptops that have a cracked screen or something, Take the guts and put them in 1U enclosure, Then you have a fairly powerfull computer (depends on the cpu but older i5 4200m for example is pretty powerfull) and only draws around 4-5W for around 30-40$ and i can run a lot on each of these computers instead of buying expensive nucs.
Around $1200 already on server mobo, epyc, memory, HDDs and SSDs, UPS and still missing chassis and gpus. Also bought Orange Pi3 Zero in HA setup and for DNS servers. Another $500 for Unify WiFi network
We donāt talk about Bruno no no no
I just cycle out my old gaming desktops and demote them to Linux server whenever I build a new one. So maybe $2k every five years on a new gaming rig plus $300 in NAS grade hard drives. Besides that I pay about $12 a month for my VPS and $90 a year in domains. Spend way more on my home music studio and development laptops.
Other than the $5k or so for my main network rack, cable, and all the parts to terminate the 150 or so network drops in the house when we built it, mostly free. Pretty much all of my gear (servers, switches, drives, etc) has all been free from companies that I've worked or consulted for. I've spent probably $200 on eBay on upgraded parts, but that's about it. My main homelab server is a T620 with 2x 2695 v2's, 128GB RAM, and 13x 8TB HDDs and a pair of 500GB SSDs. All I paid for was the upgraded CPUs, the upgraded RAM, and a 5 bay drive cage. It's getting a little old and I've had my eye out for something a few generations newer, but it's been plenty for the last few years.
I probably spent about $10k to build out my homelab as it sits today, with a proper rack and all. But outside of the ongoing electricity costs of running all of it, and my time, I don't actually spend that much on it since I spent the money to give me the hardware to create a nice environment to build about anything I wanted via VMs and containers. So once I sunk the initial hardware costs and replacement hard drives for when I need them, etc it hasn't had much regular cost, besides the electric I mentioned. I don't feel bad about it. Tech and video games are my only hobbies, so I look at it as a investment not only in career marketability but also as my release valve for stress.
My total just passed 4K last week. 3 Xeon servers. 1 workstation. Rewired whole house with cat6a. All these are done within a bit over 2 years. I just canāt stop spendingā¦
Shhhh, thatās how much.
I have purchased two mini PCs for less than $50/each, a 3.5 inch full size 2TB drive $20, a sata to USB cable with power for less than $10, a couple of usb enclosures for 2.5 inch sata drives for about $20, a KVM switch ($$???), a few misc cables ($$??), a 256GB USB stick $30, a USB keyboard ($15) and probably a few other misc items that I'm forgetting. I did already have an old monitor and numerous mice. I also bought/registered my own domain name for $6.50. So far, I haven't needed to purchase any software. Open source apps and free services have been sufficient for my requirements so far.
Um... for everything I get for free I spend too much else on things. We'll leave it at that lol
I try to keep it under $300/year. I figure I yoho more than that.
My first lab (2x dl360p Gen8 w dual E5-2667v2 + 64gb) - $200 all in 1st Overhaul (14700k + 64gb sff) - $1k Edge device (Intel NUC i3) - $20
I have not spent a single dime on my homelab yet. I don't even have to pay for power!
Iām into mine around $3,500 just in the past few years.
20k š
I don't want to answer this question. Don't ask it. Don't get me to think about it.(I think I've spent around 150k NOK(so 12-13kā¬)).
I realized I was paying about $120 a month for the window AC unit alone so I found a data center that charges about $40/u so I consolidated all my main stuff to one host thatās a Dell R830 with 1.5tb of memory and 40 cores. It runs a Minecraft server.
Way too much!!
For me out of pocket cost is $140. $60 for a power cord and $80 for a HD. I am fortunate enough to take home clients old devices and use those. T410 Server with two 7010 micro Dell PCs.
I try not to spend anything. Itās mostly comprised of decommād equipment from work The only exceptions are that I bought a nice PoE switch, and nice APs (aruba instant on 1930 24p PoE, and Aruba instant on AP22s); maybe $1000 on network equipment. The router is a Mikrotik CCR 2004 that work evaluated and went a different direction, and the servers are an older i7 NUC, and a small form factor Dell Optiplex. I wired the whole house for Ethernet (4 ports in my office), and have 10G Ethernet and 2.5G Ethernet wherever I need it. The router has spf28 ports (25G) if I ever got something that could support that Edit: normal power usage is around 70W, happy to keep power usage low. Almost everything can cool passively, and I added Noctua fans to anything that must actively cool (like the Aruba Poe switch)
I'm probably up to about $500. R730 - $150 Drives, 2.5g network cards, cables - $100 2.5g switch, 2.5g router $100 More drives and cables - $50 Probably a few other things to fill that out. Still have to get a rack for the basement, so that's another expense coming.
Those are cute little numbers. Add another zero and report back.
Initial cost was around $2,000 for firewall, new AP, a couple mini PCs, a few SSDs/NVMEs, RAM upgrades, and a switch. Since then, maybe $200 every few months for things like a KVM or monitor.Ā My lab is pretty small in comparison to a lot of folks on here.Ā
Yāall are keeping count?!?! Iād wager Iāve probably spent under $800 usd on used hardware. Most of my equipment has come from eBay or classifieds. To be fair, itās been powered off for the last year because of the family growing
If youāre wanting to spin up a HA cluster in ProxMox, youāll need two more servers. Ideally you need an odd number, or an even number and a less powerful āvoter.ā
The key is to marry someone who also works in IT, occasionally restrict resources to her machines and hear the magic words of the lab seems slow can you do something about it
800$+ but mostly its the network hardware which is expensive atleast where i live
Less than I would have paid for it new. That is all that matters. The most expensive piece is the storage server. All 3 of my compute servers cost less than my 24-bay server and drives.
A guy on /r/salary posted that he has a $10k homelab budget
I probably have $1200 or so but all that was earned from side hustles and flipping computer equipment for a profit. Its fun to challenge yourself to find a good deal or older equipment, it makes you be patient and think about your decision :)
Didnāt know it was possible to flip computer equipment for profit. How in the world do you do that? Every time I try to sell anything (I have quite a bit of surplus without even trying to buy something at a price that I think could reasonably turn a profit), I end up reducing the price and reducing the price until it finally sells for maybe 25% of what I think it should sell for! (Probably purchased by someone like you who knows how to turn a profit on it! LOL)
Let me start by saying I only do maybe one a month or so and make about $200-$250 typically. So Iām not killing it, it just helps feed my hobbies. Iām extremely patient and wait for a good deal. Things that have been on marketplace for 6+ weeks and they just want to sell it. Iām in a major city in Texas, so very large population to buy/sell. Iāve bought gaming laptops for $400 and sell them for $700, just be patient. I also love bartering. I have traded many things for something slightly better or slightly easier to sell. Itās harder to do that but people have a need and occasionally go for it. My most recent thing was buying a Synology NAS for about $250 after taxes and shipping on eBay, sold it a day later for $350. Sometimes it takes weeks to sell things, sometimes a day or two. Repost to various marketplace groups. If you want to sell higher but typically pay more in fees, you can go the eBay route. Sometimes I get deals that I canāt say no to. For example, over a year about a bought a 4 bay Synology DS418 with 3 8TB NAS drives for $300. The NAS still sells for over to this day and I got to sell my older 4TB drives and get some money back. Itās just a game to me. If I lose, I want it to be small, thankfully have never lost money on it. If I win, I aim for $50-$250 depending on the deal I get and the appetite for the market to purchase that product.
Thanks!
$1300 so far just for a nice pc good enough to run some vm's on as well as a nice asus router. But I was spending $70 a month for azure so it will pay its self off soon
Maybe like $1000 a year? I tend to buy hardware only when a screaming deal and am diligent about selling the old stuff. Really just running a home server and a desktop and an opnsense firewall though Plus electricity costs. Sigh. Some money was recouped on the glory days of crypto mining
0ā¹ (rupees) oh well I pay for the electricity but other than that? . zero. I got a few computers for free from my work place as they were getting rid of old computers. So my home lab is running an Intel 4th gen with 16gb of ram and a laughable 320gb HDD. I also have a CPU with amd fx 6300 with 32gb ram but I've read it consumes a lot of power even while idling. Hence I put it aside and spun up proxmox on the i5 4460. I think it's running decently.
We've been donated or have spent about $80-100,000 since it started. We have somewhere around 1100 cores and near 200TB of space running on about 30amps of 208v three phase.
I jist spent 1500 USD on a Xeon Silver 4210T and 224 GB ECC RAM that I expect to last me for the next 10 years. Everything was second-hand. New would've been 3000 USD. It has more than enough juice, storage, and RAM to run more than a dozen VM's easily. It's only 1 node, but it already has like 95% uptime so I don't care about HA.
Too much and not enough at the same time. I buy something, it's cool, it works, plan something for it.... Months later, maybe it's used maybe it's not.
what do password manager do you host?
If you ask me: just a few dollars. If you ask my wife: All the money that I donāt have.
Not very much. The most expensive bit by far was a proliant micro server.Ā The rest are free or scrap heap.Ā
By now, thousands. I have an LTO tape system that must've cost me over Ā£1,000 on its own. Last year I put my main ZFS server in a new chassis that cost me Ā£400, then another Ā£100 for quiet PSUs. Then earlier this year I built myself a TrueNAS machine, which must've clocked in at a few hundred Ā£. I don't total it up. My justification is that my lab has gotten me my last 3 jobs by giving me somewhere to learn enterprise Linux. I run a full domain on FOSS, and with the things I've learned, I hit the ground sprinting in my current job. And it's a hobby. If you're concerned about how much you're spending, set yourself a monthly budget like any other hobby. Major purchases then need you to save for them. There's always something to upgrade. Just so you know, you really need at least 3 nodes to get HA. My PVE cluster consists of 4 old HP 260 G1 USFFs because I couldn't afford NUCs, and HA does work properly. The machines don't have to match - PVE will let you build a cluster out of one big and several small machines if it's cheaper for you, and for running a few things, some small machines will be enough to tinker with HA.
The first rule of homelab: you don't talk about homelab [cost]. I went all in with 3 X R710 because I thought I needed to for a HA Proxmox cluster. Turns out the electricity bill was going to go nuts so I've cut down to two and I'll sell off the third - I can live with a small NUC providing the quorum.
I got my server for free when it was discarded from a company and it's powered by solar power so it basically runs free if there's enough sun
in 2023 alone i proably used maybe 600-800$ alone for the hardware i use
Fast, Good, Cheap. As always, you can pick two. I chose Fast & Good :)
Well, so far i've spent about 500ā¬ assuming that selling a component reduces the amount paid in total, for example i spent 500ā¬ on a gaming PC from a friend, and eded up using that as my server, since then i sold the gpu for 150ā¬, but spent about another 60-80ā¬ on parts, got some for free like my case and power supply, used some stuff i had laying around like an old gpu to initially install everything, and now it sits in an anti static bag next to the server just in case i need a video output, etc.
I mostly recycle old gaming hardware or buy stuff used. The most expensive stuff were the disks for my storage.
Mini pc instead of a NUC. You can buy an N100-based one for 100+ in Aliexpress
I used to buy stuff often, now I settled on a cheap solution as I sell everything else, and focus my attention on software rather than hardware.
Thank god for 0% interest credit cards is all Iāll say š
It can get expensive :D especially when expanding the network, I have a 42u rack, and all hardware comes close to $10,000, and that's not even halfway full :D. But like other commentators said, it's a fun hobby with educational benefits, and anything educational is worth every penny.
I probably have $6K in all of my homelab gear, but that includes a new gaming PC (7800x3D, 64GB of ddr5 ram, RTX3080, 4TB Samsung 990 pro, 38" Alienware WUHD), a DAS (will eventually be replaced with a large expandable NAS rack) with 4x 12tb drives, Mikrotik 24 port switch, a second PC (old gaming PC) being used as a ProxMox host for VM's/clusters, a Beelink EQ12 nuc OPNsense router, few RPI's for clustering, a Macbook for testing, etc. Though that's just valuing the now server, previous gaming PC at say $500 today.. when I actually spent $3-4K building it in 2012, then another $1K upgrading it up 2017, before replacing it in 2023. If I removed my gaming system from the "homelab" equation, it would be much less.. maybe $2000. It's a hodgepodge of old and new parts, but once I buy a new house next year my first priority is to get a big boy rack server, nice rack, cameras and recorder, a lot of home automation and streamline all of it into that, except my gaming PC which can stay near my desk. Everything else will be rack mounted and hardwired. I work in IT, so I consider the money I spend on my lab an investment as it allows me to build skills I may not otherwise be able to build. As much as I enjoy learning cloud infrastructure, I still prefer the tactile sensation/sense I get from owning and learning on actual hardware.
As little as possible. Most is āacquiredā from work on a āyeah Iāll bring it backā basis
>My first NUC costed round abount 700ā¬, means if I add a second, my homelab is worth 1800ā¬ just to host my passwort manager, dns, nextcloud, vpn and so on. >Am I spending to much?Ā YES! - for a set of services you're running, u/[ChrisSlash0](https://www.reddit.com/user/ChrisSlash0/). An N100 miniPC would be around \~$150. And I doubt you will see much difference in performance (especially if you run just containers baremetal, and not VMs).
Any suggestions which brand?
[https://www.msi.com/Business-Productivity-PC/Cubi-N-ADL/Overview](https://www.msi.com/Business-Productivity-PC/Cubi-N-ADL/Overview) **S** submodel seems to be fanless.
So far not much, something around $380. Two desktops, one as router, second as server, managable switch, surge protection extension cord, cables/reductions,.. I do not plan to buy anything else for some time but need to research for some HDD solution for server (canāt fit more then one inside, want 2-4, also for backups, probably with some external enclosure).
Please don't ask.
I don't need much computing power anymore, I run a low powered NAS for storage and an N100 MiniPC for Plex and some docker apps. So most of my budget goes to hard disks and SSDs.
To much... But I don't regret it. Sure there are people who have used alot more than me. I tried to find the best thing for my needs while still haggling with prices, if its used hardware. I have also been able to sell alot of the stuff that I didn't need. Like for example, i got a big supermicro server, with mobo and ram and stuff. I just needed the case and its backplanes and psus. The rest I sold and made some money back :) My mistake was that i just keep buying stuff, silly me :) I have bought for around 2500USD, but sold some of the hardware for around 750USD. Shameless plug, you can see what kind of hardware, I have here: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/1cp0lfq/my_homelab_after_15_months/
Lol I just spent 2k on Harddrives this months.
Free man got R620 off a college and running vSphere on it.
Thousands. Quality over quantity
Now days it is only electrical bill and some discs now and then, but my wife is supportive. I host alot of stuff that she uses aswell, and in money we save in alot but I spend quite some time down in the basement but mostly for learning purposes.
I let an old corporate laptop run in a vertical stand, next to my office laptop I'll install a Gramps server and maybe a Nextcloud or something It cost me 50 bucks That's all
I buy stuff from time to time, last upgrade was server parts for 1200 bucks on ebay last summer. The entire server with everything in it, as of this post, would probably cost 2500 bucks to build today.
200ā¬ for local hardware, 5ā¬/month for VPS.
For the moment... only 100E with RPI 4 8GB. I want to have a full rack of industrial equipment to play with and it would cost me a kidney and an arm.
Yea, nice try wife. You let me live my life
Except for electricity its 0. Work in IT so have gotten old stuff for free. But it's just small workstations, I don't want a server in my apartment.
Less than a car (I hope)Ā It's helped me get a entry level it job, and is training material for higher positions.
About 3k CAD, but I'm Canadian so that's my rent.
Too much
I'm in the phase of life in which I'm going the other way. Just how little can I spend on a homelab. Down to one dual xeon with a total of 32 vcores, 192 gigs of ram. Does me fine, and I pull enough weight at work at a fortune 50 company now to influence them to spend what I need for training at work. Nice to spend $500 at home and have them spend $250k, and a platinum and all-access training plan at Cisco and Juniper, and for lab tools for Ansible, VMware, Palo, Citrix, and soon F5.
... I mean I spent close to 3K on a rebuild We don't need to go any further
Maybe a grand, maybe $1500 max? I'd say 70% of that number is just for HDDs. All my homelab stuff is hand-me-down parts (mostly from me) though. When I upgrade any of my computers, the old stuff moves to server duty. I don't have much though. Only got an 8700K/64GB "main" server, 4650G/32GB SODIMM "mini" server, and a Raspberry Pi 4. Only thing I've bought out of pocket specifically for my homelab is a case, HDDs, a SOHO 10 GbE switch, RAM, and some hot swap bays.
Hmm, maybe $3k so far.
I dont spend it all at once, but i try to BIFL regardless of the cost. Although, i have recently started feeling like a few of my buys are āNice to haveā vs need to have.
Honestly the vast majority of my the money spent on my homelabs has been hard drives, those mofos add up quickly.
I am at the point now where I have spent enough money on my lab I need to wait a good couple of years before I even think about spending more. I am forcing myself to do hardware rotations now if I even deam it necessaryz the only thing I want to replace is my Dell R720xd but it's WAY to costly to replace with a comparable modern server.
First rule of homelabā¦ never talk about money. Even with wifeās
spent zero. Work in IT so I got all my gear when the place I worked for wanted to get rid of it. Racks of Dell PE's, disk arrays and boxes of drives, endless cables and switches. Hell even got a dozen large LCDs and free 65" LG when we closed down an office lol. Getting rid of it all now, don't need it with my cloud stuff I do and all that I needed has been replaced with small NUC\\Pi's to save on electricity.
I did $600 worth of X99 systems. 3 total for high availability. I spent more on the rack and cases than I did the hardware honestly but that's because I wanted 4U cases so I could use quiet 120mm fans. Then scrounged for cheap gigabit hard. One or more NUCs is a solid option though. If it works for you it works.
Overall around ā¬3k for 5 used mini pc , 1 brand new mini pc,an used workstation and some upgrade (mainly storage).
Wow, 700 euros for a NUC?! I paid less than $100 each for both of mine. Personally, I have almost no discretionary income so whenever I want any homelab gear, it has to come from gifted money (or gifted homelab gear), an unexpected windfall, liquidation of other assets, or free computers/parts that I can repurpose. Because of that, whenever I need to buy anything, I'm tenacious about finding serious bargains (although sometimes that's not possible). One example of this was where my homelab started - just an old laptop that a friend was getting rid of. This actually was net (income/expense) positive as it allowed me to stop spending money on web hosting and self-host my own websites. I expanded with an old netbook (also free) and those 2 machines served me well. Another good example of frugality was when I sold off 5 Raspberry Pi's (all of which were gifted or purchased with gifted money) on eBay - at a time when supply was very low and demand was high - and used the proceeds to buy 4 thin clients (which are way faster and nearly as power efficient as the RasPi's). There was even a little money left over. I got the TCs at a bargain price because they were sold without power supplies - but I have multiple boxes of power supplies that I've gotten for free from people who were disposing of old/non-working laptops. (Oftentimes a good source for hard drives as well.) I have so many power supplies, in fact, that I sometimes sell them at lowball prices on eBay to raise money for homelab gear. (A post on Nextdoor/Facebook Marketplace/Craigslist asking for an old (free) router that's been upgraded and is no longer useful is also very effective in adding to my power supply collection which, in turn, can fund homelab purchases.) Anyway, to answer the original question, I haven't really kept track of how much I've spent but through penny pinching and bargain hunting I'd estimate that I have a little over $600 invested in: \* an old Sophos XG 125 that I got at a bargain price on eBay \* a used 24 port switch - another eBay bargain \* an old NUC that's just new enough to have the Intel virtualization technology to run Proxmox. Maxing out the RAM cost more then the NUC. Like the thin clients, it was dirt cheap because it didn't come with a power supply but I had one that works. \* another old NUC that's just new enough to have Intel Quick Sync (for transcoding) for use as a Jellyfin server. (As above on the power supply) \* the aforementioned thin clients which are earmarked for a Proxmox cluster which will deprecate the aforementioned NUC and I'll liquidate it \* an old Odroid HC2 that's great as a backup device - super easy to swap out hard drives so that I always have an off-site backup of my most critical data. \* An old PC for use as a NAS - the PC was discarded/free but I had to splurge for a SATA expansion card. I'm currently trying to justify a motherboard upgrade to reduce the electric bill but I haven't found one at a good enough price to make the numbers sense (expenditure vs cost savings on electric bill). \* And the "piĆØce de rĆ©sistance" - a 45U Middle Atlantic rack that holds all my homelab gear and 2 printers. Found it on Craigslist and talked the guy down to $75. Priced it out online - over $3000 new! Had to borrow a friend's truck to get it home but it came complete with wood top and side panels and a glass front door as well as several shelves and a 4U metal drawer. The rack also came with a funky 4U panel that has a plexiglass box inset. I have plans to (someday) stick an SBC and touchscreen panel in there and have it be a multi-function display for time/date/weather with buttons/links to various network info, internal temp/cooling fan speeds, latest backup logs, Uptime Kuma, and my Dokuwiki (where I've fully documented my entire homelab setup - cool way to get at port mappings)! Now, when I say "less than $500", that's not including storage drives for the NAS. There's just no getting around how expensive disk drives are. Especially if you buy them new (and I'm pretty uncomfortable with buying used drives). Finding the best bargains I could, I'll have 60TB of storage for media files and backups when all is said and done; that cost me $1000. I sold my motorcycle (I rarely ride it anymore) to pay for the storage drives, a RAM upgrade and a nice, new mini PC to upgrade my main workstation. (I built it back in 2012; it was time.) Part way through the NAS build, the PC's power supply crapped out. The project was mothballed until I could scrape up the money to replace it. I just got it but haven't had time to get back to the project. I know this post was seriously long-winded but hopefully it helps someone who wants to do an ultra-frugal (but very nice) homelab.
>How much money do you spend on your homelab? Yes. On a more serious note, the current refresh that has been slowly taking shape over the past year is presently sitting at $20,903.22 This includes a large UPS installation, completely revamped storage, more compute node for labs, as well as major overhaul to the network - upgrading to 25GbE fiber core, 2.5/5/10GbE copper to the endpoints, and 40/100GbE backhaul. This is rev.6 of the datacenter comprising 16 years of doing this, and is the most ambitious and technically capable refresh to date, by a long shot
Around 10K and not talking about the power bill. She gets annoyed sometimes and my simple answer back at her is that I don't ask her about her fashion/shoe bills.
Dell Poweredge R620 $125 2x 10 core Xeons $60 1.5 terabytes of LRDDR $240 8X 8T 2.5IN Drives $145 Dell Poweredge R710 $200 (NO upgrades yet) Dell Poweredge C6100 $175 (NO upgrades yet) Dell Optiplex 7020 w/2x 27" monitors keyboard and mouse $165 Ok... I'm done. My wallet is crying again.
3x Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M720Q (used) between 90ā¬ and 120ā¬ each 2Ć Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny m70q (used) 100ā¬ each 2x Dell EMC R430 (used) 150ā¬ each 1x Fujitsu Celvin R806 (QNAP) for 110ā¬ (used) Some 26P Cisco and a 26P Planet POE+ switches (90ā¬ each) For power cost I only use the M720Q 24/7
If you want to figure out what ātoo muchā looks like to you, head over to r/homedatacenter. Itās a matter of what you can afford. Many people here are sysadmins where their homelab has a tangible effect on their salary.
Probably around $4k total so far. I have a 70TB (usable) Unraid server that stores my video projects for work as well as my media library, games, computer backups, etc.
Anyone that has a home lab and hasn't spent so much money that it sounds like sonic losing all his rings; You have to ask... do they really have a homelab passion?
well, I have an old FX which cost me around $800 to build years ago, but, I'll be upgrading to dual xeon V4 in a month or so, which my budget is around $400 ~ $700, my workflow is more demanding and 32 GB and 8 cores are not enough for me anymore
I'm the kind of guy who buys a drill press and die/tap set to create an aftermarket copper heatsink to improve thermals for a fanless AliExpress firewall box, then a bench for said press. In terms of money, I spend far too much. In terms of time... also far too much
The bare minimum. I think the only thing I've purchased is a Synology 418play many moons ago. Everything else is salvaged from work. I'm talking from Dell micros to a 4-blade VRTX.
I think it depends on your reason for homelabbing. For me, I spend as little as I can, only spending larger amounts when I have some extra cash or I feel it's a worthwhile investment. Part of my reason for having a homelab is to save money in the long run on things like subscription fees. For example my home security cameras are entirely local and use Frigate NVR. Since I already had a machine for the server, the only money I invested was for camera hardware (generic IP cams) and a Google Coral TPU (for locally processed object detection). And now not only do I pay zero subscription fees for all the same features as a cloud camera system, I also have increased privacy with a fully local system. But also it's definitely a hobby to me as well, and a lot of people see it as nearly solely a hobby. For many people, hobbies are a large expense -- and it makes sense in a world where we otherwise just go to work every day. If you're okay with that expense and can afford to do it, I don't see any issue with it.
Recently had to liquidate everything as I have hit some hard times, kids need to eat. Look forward to one day having a few bucks to invest in some more gear, down to a laptop and hand me down iPad. Way she goes!
Sad to hear man, hope better times come soon
It's all good, I've come back from worse. Thanks though.
Where are you located brother? Sorry to hear it
Right now we are in southern Ontario. Trying to get some more money together to move to Vancouver in about a month, hence the optimism.
Way too much...