I’m thinking about introducing yet another server at home, this time to predominately act as a seedbox/NAS. Bargain Hardware in the UK will give me the following server for $1,150 delivered to Australia - cheaper than anything similar locally once you add in the 12x LFF caddies and dual 10-core CPUs.
I can then shove in it 12x 14TB refurb HDDs for $249 each ($2,998) for a total of 116.251 TiB of storage in a 12-wide RAIDZ2 setup.
The server might be cheap, but how much would I pay to power it? This server idles at around 150W with 12x drives in it and spikes to about 350W under load. If we assume an average 200W power consumption, that’s 4.8kWh/day.
I pay 28c/kWh for electricity, but have 13kW of solar on my roof and due to having an EV, have a special EV plan that gives me 8c/kWh electricity between midnight and 6AM.
My electricity rates roughly work out to this for a 24hr period:
- 00:00 - 06:00: 8c/kWh (off-peak grid)
- 06:00 - 09:00: 28c/kWh (peak grid)
- 09:00 - 17:00: 11c/kWh (solar)
- 17:00 - 00:00: 28c/kWh (peak grid)
I put 11c/kWh for solar as that’s what I get as a feed-in credit. I’d miss out on this credit if I’m using the electricity, so in effect, every kWh of solar I consume, it costs me 11c.
Using that table above, 1kW sustained for 24 hours (24kWh) would cost me $4.16 - or 17.34c/kWh.
The server uses 200W on average, 24 hours a day - that’s 4.8kWh a day, which at 17.34c/kWh is 83.232c/day, $303.80/yr, or $25.31/m.
The cost of the server itself (without HDDs), spread out over 3 years, is $31.95/m. With HDDs ($4,148) it is $115.23/m
So bare minimum, I’m looking at $55.26/m (no HDDs) to $115.23/m (with HDDs) to run this server at home.
A$55/m, US$36/m, 34 euro/m gets me a decent dedicated server, but won’t have anywhere near this level of storage, 8TB, maybe 16TB max. It would however, have a much better internet connection than my 1000/50 NBN line.
Launtel will sell me 1000/400 for $10/day, which is $3,650/yr or $304.17 per month. 1000/50 is $109/m with Superloop, so going to 1000/400 is an extra $195.17/m
$25.31/m for power + $115.23/m for the server with storage + $195.17/m for the internet connection
All up it’s $335.71/m to host a seedbox at home with 1000/400 connectivity. Shared between 10 people, that’s A$34/m (US$22/m, 20.60 euro/m) with 11.5TiB of space and unlimited bandwidth. Pretty decent deal considering what’s out there seedbox or dedicated box wise:
- Rapidseedbox Lean Supreme - US$13/m 2TB storage, unmetered
- Ultra.cc Panzer - US$25.69/m 6TB storage, 15TB upload
- Seedit4me Super Hero Pro - 23.99 euro/m, 3TB HDD, unmetered
- Seedhost.eu - 20.4 euro/m, 8TB HDD, 20TB bandwidth
- Hetzner server auction - 31.57 euro/m, 8TB storage, unlimited bandwidth
- Kimsufi - US$$24.33/m, 6TB HDD, 100mbit unlimited
If I was to share it with some mates, we’d also get to share our private tracker access via Jackett.
Do I have 10 friends who wanna pay $35/m or $420 a year for a seedbox at my place? Dunno. Probably not, so this thought experiment was a big waste of time and all I have to show for it is a boring blog post.