How Much Money I Save Using A Home Server

Ever wondered if paid cloud hosting solutions like AWS, Google Cloud, Heroku, and DigitalOcean are giving you the most bang for your buck? Have you ever wanted to create your own home server to host your websites?

About 2 years ago, I decided to go all in with using my own home server. The main reason for this was due to me wanting flexibility, but it turned out that I saved a lot more money than expected. In this article, I'm going to show you just how much money I save per year moving from DigitalOcean to my own home server.

Calculating the Home Server Cost

In order to calculate the total cost per year, we first need to get the total cost per month of the machine we are using.

We do that by getting the following parameters:

  1. Average Hours Per Day The Server is Turned On
  2. The Power Supply Unit's (PSU) Wattage
  3. The Average kWh In Your City

Average Hours Per Day The Server is Turned On

For the total hours I will have the server on per month, let's just do 24 hours per day to make things simple.

The Power Supply Unit's (PSU) Wattage

The computer I use for servers is the Dell OptiPlex 7010 Tower Computer.

I have customized the specs to my liking.

Here are the specs:

  • PSU 240 W

Notice the Power Supply Unit's wattage is 240W.

The Average kWh In Your City

Since I live in Toronto, which is in Canada, for the average kWh, I checked this website: https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/rates

image1

I was able to get the average cost per kWh with these 3 numbers.

(13.4 c per kWh + 9.4 c per kWh + 6.5 c per kWh) / 3 = 9.77 c per kWh or 0.0977 per kWh.

This will obviously be different based on the city you live in. And since I live in Canada, these numbers here are in Canadian dollars, not US dollars.

Plugging it all in

Finally, now that we have all the numbers, I plugged all these into this calculator.

image3

Electricity usage of a Computer

Which as you can see, the Cost Per Year came to be ~ $205.43 CAD for the Home Server.

Calculating the Digitalocean Cost

For this, it's pretty easy, I went on the DigitalOcean website and checked the pricing for the computers that came relatively close to my home server's specs.

image4

https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing

That came to be about $80 x 12 = $960 USD per year.

Which, if you converted into CAD, the final cost for a Digital Ocean server is $1,254.19 CAD per year.

image2

The Bottom Line

Total Savings

  • = Cost of DigitalOcean Server - Cost of Home Server
  • = $1,254.19 - $205.43

And there you have it folks, I save $1048.76 per year!

Conclusion

It's always tough migrating things over to a new platform. In my case, I did not realize just how much money I actually spent on cloud solutions when I could have just used my own home server for a much cheaper cost.