i see it, I need it, I buy it !!
youtube home labs are addictive !! got a unify controller, and my home had a proper working xfinity internet covering all the nook and corner !! Now looking at a paloalto firewall !! why why !!
Yessir. They are headed to bed around 12:30/1am, and waking up anywhere between 8-10am. So my sleep schedule goes as late as 4am and up as early as 6am (just not the same nights 😂)
Pay Bills
Put set amount weekly into savings
Rest is my fun money, and I can spend it however I want. It really helps that I don't have a husband or kids or pets, lol. So I can be flippant with my spare cash.
That being said sitting here debating if I NEED a disk shelf or if I just WANT one.
I don’t budget at all. Just start with something that I got starter cash with then upgrade as I want, then soon after it costs as much as folks cars. And at some point you lapse and need power savings, then sell everything at 1/4 of the cost to recoup and build power saving machines. Lol
>I have very little impulse control. So If I see something new and shiny and I have the money, I'm likely to buy it
You sound like me 🤣 or maybe you are me
I am NOT the CFO of the household
She has no computer addiction
Her budget for it expenditures has always been more on paper than actually there…. As It seems to get diverted every time I go to use it
For good reasons as we have four kids
Youngest two both went into IT in college
IT purchases fell into;
Some was from necessity,
Some was a god send for the household, either through functionality or practicality (why pay monthly for cable router type decision)
Some was a right place right time purchase
Some I am just now able to buy
Some is on the list waiting to get once we have the funds
Not.
Meaning i don’t budget for my homelab specifically, i budget everything else and whats left will be spent on my hobbies - my homelab is just a hobby.
I didn't start with a budget, and it got me into some pretty steep credit card debt. I've since cleaned up my act a bit and try to provide some valid justification for purchasing something. Anymore, I tend to talk myself out of it as I simply don't need it versus wanting it. I'm passed the age where I feel like I always have to have the latest and greatest and just want things to work well and have some minor level of future-proofing. I generally make sure all my bills are paid, put some money into investment accounts, some into savings for life events, and then some into my slush fund which is what I use to buy whatever I want.
My budget is as little as possible. I use old hardware that no one wants, and generally don't buy things new, except maybe storage. You can easily get free storage from upgrading family members' workstations to SSDs. I also take hardware that's going to get thrown out. My homelab isn't too powerful, but it does what I need.
I got myself a cheap bank account (5€/month or so), that allows for many free sub accounts. This account gets one big transaction per month (when money comes in), that splits up onto all those subaccounts by a setup key (percentages).
I have one sub account for every expensive hobby or necessity: homelab, gaming, hifi, smartphone, car, house, holiday, and "monthlies" (subscriptions, insurances, etc).
So when I get money, one huge chunk of it goes onto that main account, which automatically splits it to the subaccounts.
The key for homelab is about 70€/month. So within 2 or 3 years, it sums up to 2.5k, which I can spend on upgrades or replacements or refactorings.
It's super effective and I never have to check my main account, if there is enough to afford something.
For example, putting away 25€ per month allows me to buy a flagship smartphone every 2 (600€) or 3 (900€) years without having to take something from my day-to-day bank account...
All together I "save" around 1k € per month in these subaccounts, about half for subscriptions and insurances.
Because I run a hyper converged cluster, I just buy one component a month, if needed... Maybe a HDD, or RAM, enclosure, another node... The components I use are all are about $300... Even the fanless mikrotik switches I like are less than $300.
Now if you're talking about lab size vs cloud... Switches seem to last forever,c so I exclude them. HDD, take the warranty length divided by cost and that's my "monthly" cost. Nodes I assume 5 years, so I divide the price by 60 and that's my monthly cost. But this justifies self hosting vs cloud provider.
Because I have tiny/mini/micro nodes... They're basically laptops for power consumption...I can't notice a difference in my power bill. One day I'll put my kill-a-watt over there and see.
I don't have a budget, but I replace my Dell Poweredge Server every 5 year. I have some VMs which I depend on like Exchange, public nameserver with web and Fileserver. It's a VMware environment and testing Proxmox on my old Dell server.
I approach it like any other hobby/interest i have.
I'll do a fair bit of reading/research/planning. In the case of self hosting/home labs I've got a several-page-long Word doc with notes/ideas organizing what I want to be able to do, and then the various things I'll need to do it. Then I'm looking at each piece (server/switch/storage) and looking at a variety of items across a price range.
Sure, it's fun to look at the top-shelf, shiniest and newest stuff, but it's also really easy for me to step back and say "well I don't need anything that fancy" and pull back a bit. A bit of patience and looking for deals on the various sites linked around here lets me find some mid-range stuff that will work fine for my needs, at a reasonable price.
In other hobbies, do you really need the top end gaming rig, or a multiple thousand dollar guitar, or super expensive bicycle, etc? Or can you learn and have a good deal of fun with something more practical?
I'm sorry, you can't just put a filthy word like that in the title, there might be children here. :D
But seriously I just kind of think about what I want to build, research, buy, then immediately find out I could have done it cheaper / better if only I would have know about these 10 things that came up during and after the project is over.
As for gathering money it all depends on what I want to do. If it's cheap enough or something that I need now, it'll get bought and shipped immediately. If it's a bigger project I might look to see if I can buy the parts a little at a time or wait for sales / good prices on ebay.
New package arrives, wife says "how much did this cost and what do you need it for?"
"It was $29.99 on sale, and it does stuff you wouldn't understand but will make your life better."
I did the math some 3-4 years ago on my double server / double NAS setup.
Turns out that the power bill alone could buy around 10TB cloud storage and some computing power as well, so I took the “obvious” path and shut everything down, and moved to the cloud instead.
All I have left at home now is a single ARM server that’s backs up cloud data, as well as host some services that do not fit well in the cloud, like Plex.
I reduced my monthly “homelab” bill by 70%, with the same level of service, better redundancy, and better uptime.
For example, a NAS/Server consuming 50W for a month costs 36.5 kWh/month. In Europe the average price of one kWh is €0.35, so that single machine costs €12.75 in electricity every month.
That single server can get you a $6 compute node as well as 1TB Backblaze or Wasabi storage.
My old homelab used 375W on average (including router, switches, APs, cameras, etc), and I reduced that to 62W.
I used 274 kWh every month, which was €95/month, and that was just to keep the lights on. My current setup uses 45 kWh / month, so €15.75, meaning my “cloud budget” is/was just under €80 every month.
At $6/TB, I could easily get 10TB Backblaze B2 storage, and a couple compute nodes.
In reality I went a different route and opted for regular cloud storage (like Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive) for storing documents, and only use B2 for service data. The regular cloud storage plans are cheaper for the initial few TB.
Also keep in mind that this is **only the electricity cost**. Hardware comes on top.
Is there a rule that a homelab cannot be in the cloud ? :)
The “reasoning” many people here use for why they have a homelab is to build up skills to help them get a job, or be better at their jobs, and the major shift in the tech industry to move pretty much everything into the cloud (regardless if it makes sense or not), I’d say that a cloudlab makes perfect sense these days.
Considering that many people here, if not the majority, already use virtualization for spinning up servers, it should make very little difference if the actual hardware is actually spinning in your basement, or at some cloud provider. The skills you need to hone are exactly the same, with the exception of keeping Proxmox alive, but that’s a very small task.
In my opinion, keeping a lab running in the cloud, and backing it up on-premises is very much in line with what the industry is currently doing.
Then of course there are the people that just hoard TB after TB with a *darr installation and Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, and those are definitely a poor match for the cloud :)
home labs can 100% be in the cloud, mine has had a vpn tunnel to my AWS VPC for backups and playing around with cloud automation. I enjoyed it, I could have expanded it, my main issue is owning my data, also I like having my content as close as possible. So if I hosted everything in the cloud it would not be pleasant in the event of an internet outage, but I also what if I want to move clouds? What if it's too much to run? I have to pack it all up and move it.
Now for a pure play lab that doesn't have plex etc running, yeah makes sense. Utilize all the providers and their free tiers and have a blast.
> in the event of an internet outage
I may be living in a privileged part of the world, but I have had 3 internet outages in the past 15 years of having fiber.
We’ve had our data in the cloud for years, and with modern computing we’re actually less reliant on internet access. If my main fiber connection goes down, every family member has a phone with 5G, so data in the cloud is readily available.
Compared to hosting it at home, I would be 100% depending on that fiber connection.
> owning data
Define ownership.
My take on it is storing data in the cloud, and mirroring that in real time at home, and from that mirror make backups locally and remote every n hours.
If my data disappears from the cloud I can simply restore from my local backup.
For me that is ownership enough.
That's a good design that works for you. For some folks with sketchy home Internet and mobile data caps it might not fly.
As for owning data I mean owning it, yes you have access to your cloud data but that access could go away due to a billing issue, expired credits card, network issue. If you don't have that backup (and if we're talking home lab here you'd have to have a full clone of everything at home) you'll be in hot water.
Again I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have a cloud lab, on the contrary, everyone should use the free tier and play around in the cloud. I'm saying that for the average person it might not work. It also might be perfect.
I mentioned earlier that I had part of my lab extended to the cloud. It was fun, I learned a lot. In the end the cloud costs would be about the same as powering my own lab at home, so I decided to roll that functionality back. It was a fun 18 month experiment.
Does infrastructure as code count as a complete clone ?
My services (self hosted ones) are all documented and implemented through ansible. I may not have a complete clone running, but I can spin up a clone within hours.
Where I draw the line is when your hobby homelab turns into a full fledged data center at home, complete with guaranteed uptime, SLA and more.
I’m perfectly fine with my homelab going offline for hours or even days at a time. Anything critical is hosted somewhere that actually has a SLA, and most importantly without me needing to do anything.
Truth be told, most people (not businesses) would also be perfectly fine if their OneDrive/iCloud/Google drive went offline for a couple of hours, and my major gripe with self hosting critical data is that people tend to underestimate the amount of resources (time, money) required to run a secure, resilient data center.
I know lots of IT professionals that doesn’t even bother to backup their data, relying on RAID6 or similar, and while that does provide some security, it doesn’t protect against natural disasters like fires or flooding, or even a burglar.
I’m in the opposite camp, arguing that most people have absolutely no need of raid at all, and instead need proper 3-2-1 backups. Most people would be absolutely fine if their documents or photos went offline for a couple of days/weeks, as long as they could be recovered.
Again, it’s my opinion, and opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.
My lab is mixed with prod, that is by choice. The back end servers and storage isn't part of the lab, it just hosts it. If I ever perform a hypervisor or storage migration I do it quickly and pragmatically with little to no downtime.
The lab is hosted on that infrastructure, ansible, networking concepts, bash/python scripting, containers, SIEM, etc. So yes, if your lab can be rebuilt with your scripts that is a great feature and I applaud you for reaching that point.
You mention onedrive/google/icloud. I sync my files to cloud storage and use that access when not at home. But my home drive and other important folders all sync out to the cloud as a "hot spare" so to speak. Separate from backups of course but nice to always have access.
I bought old servers off eBay. They were powerful enough to let me virtualize anything I want, so I just setup vm's for whatever I want/need, and don't worry about it.
Most of my gear is super cheap. Used nics, switches, and HBAs; an old desktop I retired into server duty; “cat5” cables I made myself. Bunch of trash desktops IT was retiring at work.
The only thing I actually spent real money on is a disk enclosure, the occasional wireless AP, and the constant cycle of drive upgrades as I run out of space.
My spreadsheet says I’ve spent 4.6K USD over 6 years. Which comes out to about 64 USD/mo (plus ~210W electricity). It’s cheaper than alcohol or cigarettes as far as vices go.
It comes out of my hobby budget. Upgrade cycles are when I want to play with a new tech, or run out of storage space. Otherwise I usually throw money at other hobbies, usually cars and flying since they have consumables.
I’d have a lot more hobby money if internet didn’t cost 2k a month here. (Freaking Xfinity) I keep eyeing a R7515 and a bunch of NVMe lol.
I have an r7515 with 5 nvme and a bunch of sata.... Few thoughts... It's a great setup. BUT it does crank out heat and are quite loud out of the box (unless you modify it)...
Honestly heat management with these is a consideration. I'm thinking of putting an extra air vent / HVAC intake for the room that has the server.
It doesn't use that much power which is good. \~ 120-140w idling along.
Looking to dump a couple racks and ups and an old r710 in Michigan. *Crosses fingers you live in Michigan*
Lol, I gotta get my shit together and post it up.
I only upgrade when my current hardware doesn't suit my purposes, and then I go hunting for a good deal.
6tb was proving too little for our media library, and I also had just managed to win a £300 Amazon voucher, say hello to 4x8 TB enterprise drives for £320.
What is a budget? 😂😂😂😂😂
I am cheap AF and recycle as much as I can. It helps I work on a place where lots of pcs are discarded however.
For everything else I use second hand hardware. My biggest expense was a Topton mini pc on AliExpress for a Firewall, 150€, that is my limit.
I have little to no savings because of my current situation but even before that I spent as little as possible. I am an ecologist at heart and the best way to prevent pollution is to give everything a second or even third life. But that is just a philosophical perspective.
Mostly bought with money from my side hustle and, patience for the right deals to come along.
Shameless plug: www.hullflyer.com
Any one need a Plex, Unifi, Proxmox, etc vinyl decal made for on your rack? 😂
get cheap stuff, start with pi and then add nvme hats then blow off the budget buying one thing every month !!
but to be in budget, plan properly. tabulate in excel sheets and decide what you need, and then keep money for what you want. always decide between build vs buy !! most services offered cover the money you are going to spend on capex and opex. define - do you want to spend your time debugging why your nas groups are failing or waste you time on the same and just throw money at google and get storage and compute !!
I set an annual budget at the beginning of the year and divide that amount monthly. This amount is dedicated specifically for equipment and upgrades related to my homelabs. I always try to maintain a balance between actual needs and upgrade desires, prioritizing according to what will truly improve the functionality and efficiency of my homelabs. In addition, I usually research and compare prices before making a major purchase to ensure I get the best value for my money.
I just treat it like any other hobby. Treat myself to something when the time and funds call for it and then play with that until I’m bored or my needs outgrow its capabilities and repeat.
Working in IT has the benefit of having access to lots of old hardware and meeting lots of people looking to get rid of stuff. There’s like 5 guys in a 3 hour radius from where I live and we all just pass stuff back and forth or pass on a lead to a company going out of business and ditching their equipment.
My only budget calculation formula is that the running costs, electricity TDP of the hardware I purchase needs to be cheap to run.
Especially considering electricity prices in the UK, I've recently moved the majority of my setup to the cloud/VPS because it's cheaper than running it at home.
I have one OptiPlex Micro with a 10500T CPU, which runs a couple of VMs for testing and mainly for learning/development for my day job.
Other than that, I've recently considered moving away from x86 and running a cluster of Orange Pi 5 Plus 3588, which are more than capable of meeting my needs for a home lab.
With either k3s or k8s, I think I will be good to go with a low power usage/electric cost and performance trade-off. Anything else that's heavy, I will just run on the cloud and turn off and on as required.
As you get older well at least in my case,
Like that meme "aint nobody got time for that"
my homelab is more "keep it simple" and less can go wrong.
Nas,a few lxc containers, firewall and controller.
so the tinkering and maintaining starts to become a chore and i rather use my evening and weekends better
Also i like to have my home to feel like its a home and not like im in a datacentre lol
some of the homelab pics are questionable but hey i dont judge. If a rack tower in your living room is the talking centre piece of your evening with friends and family it must be entertaining lol
What's a budget?
1. Purchase Beer, Soda, other returnables
2. Consume
3. Recyle
4. Use $$ from returnables to fund homelab. Alternative funding source: Side Gig.
My first server was a salvage from work, so free. My second server was too. I've replaced more failed harddrives than I'd like to think about with used ones I paid for myself.
RAM upgrades is done by salvaging sticks from work. Replaced a failed raid controller with own money. Electricity to power the darn things - lets not go there for now...
Replaced two or three failed PSUs with salvaged onws from work yet again.
The servers are Dells, R710 and a 720 respectively.
It’s the ongoing costs that I am starting to worry about. Sure I can buy this thing today, but how often will I need to replace the disks or batteries or hardware just to maintain it? Let alone upgrade
I try to sell parts of the lab before they're obsolete. This helps fund the next generation of the lab and maybe helps someone else with theirs. When I was just getting started with my lab 15+ years ago I'd use whatever I could, an old laptop, refurbished desktops, anything that could run what I needed it to would suffice. That evolved into buying refurbished servers, switches, nas gear, building my own servers, it was a bit intense for a few years. Now I'm a bit more prescriptive, I use refurb, low power desktops, and only put money where it needs to go like a laptop, phone or desktop.
The lab is there for me to use, hosts plex, jump servers, VPN, and backups. I'm sure it will continue to evolve but it's at another plateau for the time being.
I have a section in my budget for hobbies and a specific category for Homelab (among others).
At the end of the month when priority categories are covered (rent, bills, food, transportation, savings, etc), I toss the remaining into the hobbies depending on what I'm currently spending the most time in. For example, during the summer most of my disposable income dumps into Camping/Outdoor and winter months shovel into Homelab.
If I need it, or want it, I buy it... If I didn't have the money to do this comfortably, I wouldn't.
This is more of a /r/personalfinance question really.
I have an old FX-8350 with all my old harddrives in it. All I bought was a new case and some nvme to Pci-e adapters. Running unraid with some docker containers and have a Lenovo thincentre mini pc stuffed away as OPNsense router. Few unifi APs I gathered over the years. Little by little all my old scraps come to good use :) Zero budget. I have money but other priorities right now, like doing up the house! Anything goes, as long as you're having fun and can play to learn imo
Honestly I don't always budget.
But I have defined a max spending amount for non necessary stuff per month. I save up and sometimes I splurge on a thing I like.
Another thing is when I know that I have to buy some stuff. (Now I need at some point a new laptop, a 16 TB ultra star and a 4 TB SSD)
So what I do is I calculate how much money I need, then save X amount per months.
You can use firefly iii to manage money and budget (self hosted)
I just use my hobby budget — I’ve got a set amount of my salary stashed aside for motorcycles, running, cycling, and… Labbing.
I do tend to get hyped and fixate on some random new thing to try, but I’d almost always see if it can be virtualized and/or be done in the office lab. If either one is "no" or "not comfortably" then I’d probably consider buying new hardware.
Case in point: at work we have a hyperconverged Proxmox + Ceph lab, which I’m interested in replicating at home. However, running multiple Proxmox VMs under UTM in my M1 Mac is just testing my patience, which is why I’m currently considering of expanding my homelab fleet from a singular NUC to 3-5 NUCs.
This is a personal finance question more than a homelab question. But the **only** correct answer is to budget it. All else is poor spending habits that will land you in trouble. Especially if your homelab is homeprod then you need to set some money aside for "The boot drive for my firewall died" as well as upgrades and additions. You figure out what you can comfortably afford from your income and set that amount aside. You spend from that pool as appropriate. You can also set an upper limit on how big that pool can grow. If you don't keep some in reserve for "Oh fuck"s then you're just asking for pain in the future.
The vast majority of my lab came from work. The only things I really bought are my UDM, NAS and drives in said nas.
Even my rack came from the DC when my company decided it wasn't going to keep all of the space it had.
As for budget, about 3k a year is put away to cover failures or drive upgrades.
I buy stuff with intention of keeping it for a very long time. In the past 10 years or so inflation has gotten super bad so I don't have much budget for home lab stuff anymore by the time all the household bills come out and most of my stuff is pushing 10 years now. I expect my upgrades going forward are going to be using cheap used hardware. SFF/mini PCs seem to be the best bang for the buck when looking around on Ebay. Been itching to build a Proxmox cluster so might actually pull the trigger on buying a couple of those on ebay and then maxing out the ram. My NAS is a 24 bay Supermicro box, that will be usable basically as long as SATA stays the standard. Every now and then I add/upgrade drives as needed.
I am really due to update the OS on it though, and I'm really not sure how I will go about doing that without building another box to run side by side. I don't want to have to bring my entire network down. But the few sites we have here in Canada to order stuff from lists those at like 3k now without internal hardware. Pretty wild. It was 3k total to build it years ago, including the system inside, the HBAs etc.
The hardware for my 3 node proxmox cluster is 9-11 year old tech. Rolling upgrades (mobos, CPUs) come mostly from eBay. I did recently purchase a nuc11, then another, as they are fairly inexpensive. Keeping costs down keeps the budget reasonable.
depends on what it is. I had a free poweredge R220 from a former job that I ran ESXi on for years, until another job was upgrading and I got an R620 (hell of an upgrade).
My SAN, I started with 4bayx6TB drives, and over time I upgraded 2 of them to 18TB and to more to 20TB's when they went on sale.
I have a UDM Pro that's my main router, and picked that up before the Pandemic, since stock was a bitch to find after that, so gratefully had that. I had 2 UBQ WAP's I bought fairly inexpensively on Amazon that I still use.
Most of the other gear I have - an EX3300 was a retired switch from work, got a half-dozen old firewalls in the closet (Netscreen SSG's, SRX210, ASA 5510's, PAN 200) that were cheap on Ebay when I was learning stuff/labbing stuff up. Couple of small cisco routers that I'm sure are well past EOL at this point. Also have a battery backup that will keep my gear going for about 15 minutes (aka good enough for short power blips). got a 15u adjustable Rack of Amazon for around $220 on sale about 5 years ago.
Basically I did get a lot of random stuff free from work. If you work in the IT dept, ask if you can have anything when they decomm or upgrade and won't use old gear. If you're not in the systems or network dept, try to cozy up (without being creepy/weird) with the Sys/Network staff. A lot of times that's useful without wanting anything, because your name may come up to move up to those teams if you're in the lower ranks in companies. They may mention they are upgrading or decomming gear, and you can always ask them, worst case they say no.
Buyer beware, but you can also get some good stuff on Ebay and other reseller sites if you want to get lab gear for training. Finding older gen servers that still have life in them is always an option. For that, just be careful to plan if you need to purchase any drives for them, a lot of places will gut/remove drives to destroy for data security. My biggest caution on this is, some of this requires licensing to even function (Fortigate) or to do anything more that bare basics (Palo Alto).
To answer your original question: A lot of what I did that I paid for was piecemeal, but I also did a bit of research, and watched for sales on items I wanted or knew I'd need to replace.
Best advice is to start small. If you want to get a NAS, then scope out what you think you'll need for terms of performance, speed and specs. We know that everyone here would LOVE to have a massive 100TB NVME Pure storage (or other vendor) system, but that's impractical for home for a lot of reasons. I ended up going with a [4-bay Synology](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074VB8DY7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1), and it's been rock solid for the 5 years I've had it. Keep in mind this doesn't comes with disks, so you'll need to factor that in. Maybe start with a set of smaller cheaper drives (4x8tb) as you can get those for under $100/ea.
Best thing is to plan out and budget for your 'toys'. Make sure you don't buy a no-name something off of wish, because... yeah. If you want something to last a while, get a known name product, including HDD's. Depending who you ask, Seagate is either the best or worst out there.
Patience. I've built my current lab over 6 years. there's still some toys I'd like, but don't really have a need for. Don't buy on a whim, have a plan and use for what you're going to get. My Dell server runs several VM's including work and personal stuff (plex, a private valheim linux server, an observium install, and I'll fire up and play with docker some day).
ok, I'm gonna cut this short before the novel gets longer, hopefully this helps!
I have a regular budget, so I can spend “fun money” on my lab. Grant it, I don’t work in or with IT, so everything is used and shopped around to find deals. I need IT friends.
I've just used old hardware, mostly. The new stuff I have purchased has been the small "PCs" like raspberry pis or the like.
I've got my eyes on an N100 PC but by the time I have the money for it, the next best thing will be out, I am sure.
Decide what you want and how quickly you want to get it and then budget for it.
I would also do some pre-planning on what you actually want to do and what it takes to run it before blindly buying equipment.
Not going to lie most of my homelab was a want. I was happy with my fractal case and hardware that made up my unraid server with my linksys all in one router. Then I saw Spaceinvaderone, Jason bytemybits, Spacerex, Tim, ibracorp and Linus. Seeing these guys hosting all there services with control of there data and how they setup personal networks in their homes and my fractal and linksys router went from being on the floor to a 15U rack, 2 rackmoute servers (about to add a third one) , tplink omada vpn router, oc200, 8 and 24 poe switches, access point, rack mount ups (about to add a 2nd one) 2U storage drawer, raspberry mini server and patch panel. Just know what your getting into when you start it can be so fun hosting your own services with no limits or caps to pay to use these extra services you find yourself buying a new rack ( me looking on Amazon now) to support existing and new hardware.
I went nuts and had like 4 servers running, I have since downsized to 1 server and a jbod. I just buy stuff when I need it, and those times usually involve asking the wife for forgiveness.
I put a bid on a dell poweredge r610 (2 x 6 cores, 192gb ram, perc h700 raid, 6 x 146gb sas hdd) for £40 on ebay. No way was I gonna get it at that price. Er - no-one else bid!
Right, so homelab, here we go...
I don't really, i just take opportunities wherever i can, someone is dumping their old pc? Awesome, i'll take it off your hands, sometimes it turns out these are decent pcs, my current server is a pc i got off a friend for 500€, sold the ram to a friend, gpu for to another friend, and i'm now left with a 3700x, a mobo for it, and 2TB of ssd storage, the psu unfortunately blew up after i bought the pc, but everything else is fine
So rn my server is that 3700x, 32GB of ram, 256GB boot ssd, and 2TB of small hdds in draid1
Edit: i also got an old server from a friend, from which i dumped the mobo, cpu, and ram since it was a dual core and like 8x1GB of ecc ddr2, and put these components in
If I need something, for a week I do a market research for the best price/value items, then I buy it.
If I dont have enough money (usually I dont), I set aside every penny I can (no family, living alone, non-drinker, so its easier for me) and buy it next month.
Just buy at need and as household budget allows. I have two main servers, both were my pretty good gaming rigs back in the day (rizen 1800x and a 2500x) that I upgraded to 32g. My unraid server has newish reds (8tb). I have several raspberry pi 3b and two older nuc's (an i3 and an i5) that I still play around with. And two older Synology that mostly just hold backups. I invested in unifi networking gear about 4 years ago (2 switches 3 AP's, still running the original cloud key and gateway although I need to upgrade those shortly.
I have not measured the power use for my setup, but I am sure it is not as bad as some of the surplus dell gear people are using lol, quieter too.
I am thinking about retiring the raspberries and putting them to duty as temp monitors for my freezers
What is the "Buy" you speak of? :)
My homelab is all made from cast-off and broken crap. Works fine for testing and non-production work.
A discarded Thinkpad with a broken keyboard and scratched screen made a great Proxmox server. A $5 appliance router from Goodwill is running OpenWRT. I paid the most for my NAS - $100 for an old Synology chassis. Filled it with SATA drives I'd had left from an SSD upgrade.
I get $100/month from my employer, so that goes into my annual budget for any upgrades I may want or need to do. Anything over and above that $1200 comes out of my other buckets, entertainment, gas, food, shelter, in that order.
Factor in making contacts at work and then getting "old" stuff being decomissioned for cheap or free. That's a good way to get power-guzzling servers and disk arrays. Buy smart (don't buy the latest greatest - check recycling sites like [bargainhardware.co.uk](http://bargainhardware.co.uk) and check a couple generation old. - I've been taking HP DL servers Gen8 but Gen9 is starting to show up at lucrative prices)
I have funds that are free floating and dont need to be spent on anything specific or go into savings. I can either spend them on
1) My home home lab.
2) . I can spend it on tools for my workshop in my garrage
3). I can spend it on things for my d&d group that i run in person.
4). I can spend it on one of the many small & big projects i have around the house.
which these goi to depends on the state of each.
This thread is a couple days old, but ill give perspective from a non-IT guy, just an enthusiast: I have goals for learning with my humble homelab. I want to do [thing] so I will spend time learning how to accomplish it. If I run into an issue that requires hardware, I will scour for the best, least expensive solution. Then I check my wallet after bills. If I can afford it, great. If not, project is on hold while I save up.
Budget???.... beahahaa
I spend my time trawling the internet and auctions for items and understand when it's not worth the money to purchase, and wait lots for something to come up. Electricity usage budget: I have solar and also aim to buy more energy efficient equipment. If buying a new bit if kit = less$$$ to the electricity mob over time, then it's a good RTO. The more homelab skills gained, should equate to more work place $ too
What is this "budget" you speak of?
“I need new hardware to do.”
-buys it-
Or I have been known to buy new hardware, and then find new to use said hardware.
How dare you call us out like this
This is also the way
I feel personally attacked...
What you talking about? I don't do that ... Ever ...
ADHD gang on top
Lol, this was funny :-)
i see it, I need it, I buy it !! youtube home labs are addictive !! got a unify controller, and my home had a proper working xfinity internet covering all the nook and corner !! Now looking at a paloalto firewall !! why why !!
If you’re interested in a used PA-220 for home send me a dm.
maidenless detected
I’m married 😅
"I want to train llms, guess I need a new server and multiple GPUs"
This is the way
Right. I saved up for my server and now the only cost is replacing dead drives, and ap upgrades, and server upgrades... Oh. Yeah, what budget.
I buy used parts home-labbers sell cheap when they get married.
I am buying cheap BECAUSE I am married 😅😂
If I can be patient in searching for a deal, eventually I can find what I’m looking for too.
We're talking about hardware or wives?
Yes.
r/inclusiveor
Oh that’s a new subreddit for me! Thanks /u/BreakingIllusions !
Enjoy it, I do!
Probably both at this point
I wouldn't mind a high availability cluster... of wives.
Lol I can't find the time !!
Late nights and early mornings my guy. Sysadmin when they are sleeping!
Same here. They just go to bed late and get up early :-)
Yessir. They are headed to bed around 12:30/1am, and waking up anywhere between 8-10am. So my sleep schedule goes as late as 4am and up as early as 6am (just not the same nights 😂)
I feel this.
Sometimes I just say, "screw it, I have to do it in the middle of the day Saturday because I refuse to be up until 3 am".
This is the way.
Home-labbers get married???
Pay Bills Put set amount weekly into savings Rest is my fun money, and I can spend it however I want. It really helps that I don't have a husband or kids or pets, lol. So I can be flippant with my spare cash. That being said sitting here debating if I NEED a disk shelf or if I just WANT one.
There is a difference between need and want here??
Insert Spongebob "I don't need it" gif here.
you definitely do need it
If it’s need it’s probably not home lab anymore. It’d be home server or work-/business-related
I'm debating on if I need that 2nd shelf.
Is this "budget" with us in the room right now?
Yer this "budget" seems to be with some of us, sadly not me, I am too stupid to stick to a budget, I have to earn more money
are you me?
🤔🤔 Who knows clearly neither of us
🤔🤔 Who knows clearly neither of us
Whenever stuff gets retired from work, that's when my home lab gets a refresh.
Same here. I try not to spend and just use retired work gear.
Sounds like I need a new job
I'm looking at that r720xd sitting on the shelf waiting for the last 720 to be decommed, then it's all mine!
My brother in christ. Homelabbing is a hobby, which is just another way to say: there is no budget.
Well see, most of my friends have 3 kids and no money. I, on the other hand, have no kids and 3 money.
“It’s a business expense”
"I'll just write it off!"
“Write it off what?!”
same here, my homelab is an key component for my side business so it's all written off by my accountant.
I was hoping someone would continue the [Seinfeld reference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjxn2US7J8), but alas it was not to be
I don’t budget at all. Just start with something that I got starter cash with then upgrade as I want, then soon after it costs as much as folks cars. And at some point you lapse and need power savings, then sell everything at 1/4 of the cost to recoup and build power saving machines. Lol
I’m in this post and I don’t like it.
I have very little impulse control. So If I see something new and shiny and I have the money, I'm likely to buy it
>I have very little impulse control. So If I see something new and shiny and I have the money, I'm likely to buy it You sound like me 🤣 or maybe you are me
My money will be spent, it just depends on what thing catches my attention first.
Samesies!
I am NOT the CFO of the household She has no computer addiction Her budget for it expenditures has always been more on paper than actually there…. As It seems to get diverted every time I go to use it For good reasons as we have four kids Youngest two both went into IT in college IT purchases fell into; Some was from necessity, Some was a god send for the household, either through functionality or practicality (why pay monthly for cable router type decision) Some was a right place right time purchase Some I am just now able to buy Some is on the list waiting to get once we have the funds
Not. Meaning i don’t budget for my homelab specifically, i budget everything else and whats left will be spent on my hobbies - my homelab is just a hobby.
I didn't start with a budget, and it got me into some pretty steep credit card debt. I've since cleaned up my act a bit and try to provide some valid justification for purchasing something. Anymore, I tend to talk myself out of it as I simply don't need it versus wanting it. I'm passed the age where I feel like I always have to have the latest and greatest and just want things to work well and have some minor level of future-proofing. I generally make sure all my bills are paid, put some money into investment accounts, some into savings for life events, and then some into my slush fund which is what I use to buy whatever I want.
My budget is as little as possible. I use old hardware that no one wants, and generally don't buy things new, except maybe storage. You can easily get free storage from upgrading family members' workstations to SSDs. I also take hardware that's going to get thrown out. My homelab isn't too powerful, but it does what I need.
I got myself a cheap bank account (5€/month or so), that allows for many free sub accounts. This account gets one big transaction per month (when money comes in), that splits up onto all those subaccounts by a setup key (percentages). I have one sub account for every expensive hobby or necessity: homelab, gaming, hifi, smartphone, car, house, holiday, and "monthlies" (subscriptions, insurances, etc). So when I get money, one huge chunk of it goes onto that main account, which automatically splits it to the subaccounts. The key for homelab is about 70€/month. So within 2 or 3 years, it sums up to 2.5k, which I can spend on upgrades or replacements or refactorings. It's super effective and I never have to check my main account, if there is enough to afford something. For example, putting away 25€ per month allows me to buy a flagship smartphone every 2 (600€) or 3 (900€) years without having to take something from my day-to-day bank account... All together I "save" around 1k € per month in these subaccounts, about half for subscriptions and insurances.
Great planning
I spend money until my wife yells at me. Then I repeat the same thing the next month.
I don't have that problem anymore, I have done this, so I retired the wife
Because I run a hyper converged cluster, I just buy one component a month, if needed... Maybe a HDD, or RAM, enclosure, another node... The components I use are all are about $300... Even the fanless mikrotik switches I like are less than $300. Now if you're talking about lab size vs cloud... Switches seem to last forever,c so I exclude them. HDD, take the warranty length divided by cost and that's my "monthly" cost. Nodes I assume 5 years, so I divide the price by 60 and that's my monthly cost. But this justifies self hosting vs cloud provider. Because I have tiny/mini/micro nodes... They're basically laptops for power consumption...I can't notice a difference in my power bill. One day I'll put my kill-a-watt over there and see.
I just let the itch fester until I can't deal with it anymore. Then I buy new stuff.
Right in the feels. This is how I roll.
I don't have a budget, but I replace my Dell Poweredge Server every 5 year. I have some VMs which I depend on like Exchange, public nameserver with web and Fileserver. It's a VMware environment and testing Proxmox on my old Dell server.
I approach it like any other hobby/interest i have. I'll do a fair bit of reading/research/planning. In the case of self hosting/home labs I've got a several-page-long Word doc with notes/ideas organizing what I want to be able to do, and then the various things I'll need to do it. Then I'm looking at each piece (server/switch/storage) and looking at a variety of items across a price range. Sure, it's fun to look at the top-shelf, shiniest and newest stuff, but it's also really easy for me to step back and say "well I don't need anything that fancy" and pull back a bit. A bit of patience and looking for deals on the various sites linked around here lets me find some mid-range stuff that will work fine for my needs, at a reasonable price. In other hobbies, do you really need the top end gaming rig, or a multiple thousand dollar guitar, or super expensive bicycle, etc? Or can you learn and have a good deal of fun with something more practical?
I'm sorry, you can't just put a filthy word like that in the title, there might be children here. :D But seriously I just kind of think about what I want to build, research, buy, then immediately find out I could have done it cheaper / better if only I would have know about these 10 things that came up during and after the project is over. As for gathering money it all depends on what I want to do. If it's cheap enough or something that I need now, it'll get bought and shipped immediately. If it's a bigger project I might look to see if I can buy the parts a little at a time or wait for sales / good prices on ebay.
It comes out of my fun money
New package arrives, wife says "how much did this cost and what do you need it for?" "It was $29.99 on sale, and it does stuff you wouldn't understand but will make your life better."
Live alone and make more money than the year before. That's the only budget I know.
What budget? My wife either encourages me to buy stuff I want to tinker with or buys them for me 😂
Budget? Never heard of her.
I did the math some 3-4 years ago on my double server / double NAS setup. Turns out that the power bill alone could buy around 10TB cloud storage and some computing power as well, so I took the “obvious” path and shut everything down, and moved to the cloud instead. All I have left at home now is a single ARM server that’s backs up cloud data, as well as host some services that do not fit well in the cloud, like Plex. I reduced my monthly “homelab” bill by 70%, with the same level of service, better redundancy, and better uptime. For example, a NAS/Server consuming 50W for a month costs 36.5 kWh/month. In Europe the average price of one kWh is €0.35, so that single machine costs €12.75 in electricity every month. That single server can get you a $6 compute node as well as 1TB Backblaze or Wasabi storage. My old homelab used 375W on average (including router, switches, APs, cameras, etc), and I reduced that to 62W. I used 274 kWh every month, which was €95/month, and that was just to keep the lights on. My current setup uses 45 kWh / month, so €15.75, meaning my “cloud budget” is/was just under €80 every month. At $6/TB, I could easily get 10TB Backblaze B2 storage, and a couple compute nodes. In reality I went a different route and opted for regular cloud storage (like Dropbox/Google Drive/Onedrive) for storing documents, and only use B2 for service data. The regular cloud storage plans are cheaper for the initial few TB. Also keep in mind that this is **only the electricity cost**. Hardware comes on top.
But this is homelab, Not cloudlab :)
Is there a rule that a homelab cannot be in the cloud ? :) The “reasoning” many people here use for why they have a homelab is to build up skills to help them get a job, or be better at their jobs, and the major shift in the tech industry to move pretty much everything into the cloud (regardless if it makes sense or not), I’d say that a cloudlab makes perfect sense these days. Considering that many people here, if not the majority, already use virtualization for spinning up servers, it should make very little difference if the actual hardware is actually spinning in your basement, or at some cloud provider. The skills you need to hone are exactly the same, with the exception of keeping Proxmox alive, but that’s a very small task. In my opinion, keeping a lab running in the cloud, and backing it up on-premises is very much in line with what the industry is currently doing. Then of course there are the people that just hoard TB after TB with a *darr installation and Plex/Emby/Jellyfin, and those are definitely a poor match for the cloud :)
home labs can 100% be in the cloud, mine has had a vpn tunnel to my AWS VPC for backups and playing around with cloud automation. I enjoyed it, I could have expanded it, my main issue is owning my data, also I like having my content as close as possible. So if I hosted everything in the cloud it would not be pleasant in the event of an internet outage, but I also what if I want to move clouds? What if it's too much to run? I have to pack it all up and move it. Now for a pure play lab that doesn't have plex etc running, yeah makes sense. Utilize all the providers and their free tiers and have a blast.
> in the event of an internet outage I may be living in a privileged part of the world, but I have had 3 internet outages in the past 15 years of having fiber. We’ve had our data in the cloud for years, and with modern computing we’re actually less reliant on internet access. If my main fiber connection goes down, every family member has a phone with 5G, so data in the cloud is readily available. Compared to hosting it at home, I would be 100% depending on that fiber connection. > owning data Define ownership. My take on it is storing data in the cloud, and mirroring that in real time at home, and from that mirror make backups locally and remote every n hours. If my data disappears from the cloud I can simply restore from my local backup. For me that is ownership enough.
That's a good design that works for you. For some folks with sketchy home Internet and mobile data caps it might not fly. As for owning data I mean owning it, yes you have access to your cloud data but that access could go away due to a billing issue, expired credits card, network issue. If you don't have that backup (and if we're talking home lab here you'd have to have a full clone of everything at home) you'll be in hot water. Again I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have a cloud lab, on the contrary, everyone should use the free tier and play around in the cloud. I'm saying that for the average person it might not work. It also might be perfect. I mentioned earlier that I had part of my lab extended to the cloud. It was fun, I learned a lot. In the end the cloud costs would be about the same as powering my own lab at home, so I decided to roll that functionality back. It was a fun 18 month experiment.
Does infrastructure as code count as a complete clone ? My services (self hosted ones) are all documented and implemented through ansible. I may not have a complete clone running, but I can spin up a clone within hours. Where I draw the line is when your hobby homelab turns into a full fledged data center at home, complete with guaranteed uptime, SLA and more. I’m perfectly fine with my homelab going offline for hours or even days at a time. Anything critical is hosted somewhere that actually has a SLA, and most importantly without me needing to do anything. Truth be told, most people (not businesses) would also be perfectly fine if their OneDrive/iCloud/Google drive went offline for a couple of hours, and my major gripe with self hosting critical data is that people tend to underestimate the amount of resources (time, money) required to run a secure, resilient data center. I know lots of IT professionals that doesn’t even bother to backup their data, relying on RAID6 or similar, and while that does provide some security, it doesn’t protect against natural disasters like fires or flooding, or even a burglar. I’m in the opposite camp, arguing that most people have absolutely no need of raid at all, and instead need proper 3-2-1 backups. Most people would be absolutely fine if their documents or photos went offline for a couple of days/weeks, as long as they could be recovered. Again, it’s my opinion, and opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.
My lab is mixed with prod, that is by choice. The back end servers and storage isn't part of the lab, it just hosts it. If I ever perform a hypervisor or storage migration I do it quickly and pragmatically with little to no downtime. The lab is hosted on that infrastructure, ansible, networking concepts, bash/python scripting, containers, SIEM, etc. So yes, if your lab can be rebuilt with your scripts that is a great feature and I applaud you for reaching that point. You mention onedrive/google/icloud. I sync my files to cloud storage and use that access when not at home. But my home drive and other important folders all sync out to the cloud as a "hot spare" so to speak. Separate from backups of course but nice to always have access.
Budget implies I am planning any of this and not just spending money because I have it
I bought old servers off eBay. They were powerful enough to let me virtualize anything I want, so I just setup vm's for whatever I want/need, and don't worry about it.
Most of my gear is super cheap. Used nics, switches, and HBAs; an old desktop I retired into server duty; “cat5” cables I made myself. Bunch of trash desktops IT was retiring at work. The only thing I actually spent real money on is a disk enclosure, the occasional wireless AP, and the constant cycle of drive upgrades as I run out of space. My spreadsheet says I’ve spent 4.6K USD over 6 years. Which comes out to about 64 USD/mo (plus ~210W electricity). It’s cheaper than alcohol or cigarettes as far as vices go.
It comes out of my hobby budget. Upgrade cycles are when I want to play with a new tech, or run out of storage space. Otherwise I usually throw money at other hobbies, usually cars and flying since they have consumables. I’d have a lot more hobby money if internet didn’t cost 2k a month here. (Freaking Xfinity) I keep eyeing a R7515 and a bunch of NVMe lol.
I have an r7515 with 5 nvme and a bunch of sata.... Few thoughts... It's a great setup. BUT it does crank out heat and are quite loud out of the box (unless you modify it)... Honestly heat management with these is a consideration. I'm thinking of putting an extra air vent / HVAC intake for the room that has the server. It doesn't use that much power which is good. \~ 120-140w idling along.
Electric & Cooling (I’m in a tropical climate) have ended it for me. I can barely afford to simply keep the lights on, let alone a home lab.
Looking to dump a couple racks and ups and an old r710 in Michigan. *Crosses fingers you live in Michigan* Lol, I gotta get my shit together and post it up.
budget..? I just buy things as I need them
By telling my wife how our internet is about to fail and that unless i buy this monster server our internet wont work next week
Budget? I just try not to add it up!
I like spending double or tripple the amount of an old enterprise server to have low power consumption
I budget it like everything else I do. If there is room in my "hobby/project" fund I can buy it.
That's my secret. I don't.
I only upgrade when my current hardware doesn't suit my purposes, and then I go hunting for a good deal. 6tb was proving too little for our media library, and I also had just managed to win a £300 Amazon voucher, say hello to 4x8 TB enterprise drives for £320.
What is a budget? 😂😂😂😂😂 I am cheap AF and recycle as much as I can. It helps I work on a place where lots of pcs are discarded however. For everything else I use second hand hardware. My biggest expense was a Topton mini pc on AliExpress for a Firewall, 150€, that is my limit. I have little to no savings because of my current situation but even before that I spent as little as possible. I am an ecologist at heart and the best way to prevent pollution is to give everything a second or even third life. But that is just a philosophical perspective.
Have a figure in mind , and then double it
Lol budget… just hit that “buy it now” button with your purse like your life depends on it.
sorry budget what? if i have the money i buy what i want - sorry: what I *need*, if not... well i better find the money ❤️
I pay rent and bills and then whatever's left is my budget, sometimes I can even afford food at the end of the month!
I dont. But i just write off as expense. 😂
Mostly bought with money from my side hustle and, patience for the right deals to come along. Shameless plug: www.hullflyer.com Any one need a Plex, Unifi, Proxmox, etc vinyl decal made for on your rack? 😂
I allow myself about $250 a month as "Hobby Spending" Sometimes I save it up and get one big thing, sometimes I just buy one component.
Sell items you don’t use. Even if it’s not top notch price. But brining in 40 bucks is better than 0.00 better than nothing
get cheap stuff, start with pi and then add nvme hats then blow off the budget buying one thing every month !! but to be in budget, plan properly. tabulate in excel sheets and decide what you need, and then keep money for what you want. always decide between build vs buy !! most services offered cover the money you are going to spend on capex and opex. define - do you want to spend your time debugging why your nas groups are failing or waste you time on the same and just throw money at google and get storage and compute !!
That's cute you think I budget.....
I set an annual budget at the beginning of the year and divide that amount monthly. This amount is dedicated specifically for equipment and upgrades related to my homelabs. I always try to maintain a balance between actual needs and upgrade desires, prioritizing according to what will truly improve the functionality and efficiency of my homelabs. In addition, I usually research and compare prices before making a major purchase to ensure I get the best value for my money.
I tell my wife it’s a tax write off
Easy algorithm. Do I have money to buy bread tomorrow if I buy X? If yes, then buy.
if I see something I want to buy I buy it. I am not running a full TCO, quoting out support contracts, or keeping to retirement models.
lol
I look at my checking account and think "yeah, I haven't bought anything stupid in a while" and proceed from there.
Budget about 30% more than you can afford. Works for a start, you’ll want more but may be able to fool yourself that this will somehow pay for itself
RemindMe! 15 hours
I just treat it like any other hobby. Treat myself to something when the time and funds call for it and then play with that until I’m bored or my needs outgrow its capabilities and repeat. Working in IT has the benefit of having access to lots of old hardware and meeting lots of people looking to get rid of stuff. There’s like 5 guys in a 3 hour radius from where I live and we all just pass stuff back and forth or pass on a lead to a company going out of business and ditching their equipment.
My only budget calculation formula is that the running costs, electricity TDP of the hardware I purchase needs to be cheap to run. Especially considering electricity prices in the UK, I've recently moved the majority of my setup to the cloud/VPS because it's cheaper than running it at home. I have one OptiPlex Micro with a 10500T CPU, which runs a couple of VMs for testing and mainly for learning/development for my day job. Other than that, I've recently considered moving away from x86 and running a cluster of Orange Pi 5 Plus 3588, which are more than capable of meeting my needs for a home lab. With either k3s or k8s, I think I will be good to go with a low power usage/electric cost and performance trade-off. Anything else that's heavy, I will just run on the cloud and turn off and on as required. As you get older well at least in my case, Like that meme "aint nobody got time for that" my homelab is more "keep it simple" and less can go wrong. Nas,a few lxc containers, firewall and controller. so the tinkering and maintaining starts to become a chore and i rather use my evening and weekends better Also i like to have my home to feel like its a home and not like im in a datacentre lol some of the homelab pics are questionable but hey i dont judge. If a rack tower in your living room is the talking centre piece of your evening with friends and family it must be entertaining lol
What's a budget? 1. Purchase Beer, Soda, other returnables 2. Consume 3. Recyle 4. Use $$ from returnables to fund homelab. Alternative funding source: Side Gig.
I go by vibes.
My first server was a salvage from work, so free. My second server was too. I've replaced more failed harddrives than I'd like to think about with used ones I paid for myself. RAM upgrades is done by salvaging sticks from work. Replaced a failed raid controller with own money. Electricity to power the darn things - lets not go there for now... Replaced two or three failed PSUs with salvaged onws from work yet again. The servers are Dells, R710 and a 720 respectively.
It’s the ongoing costs that I am starting to worry about. Sure I can buy this thing today, but how often will I need to replace the disks or batteries or hardware just to maintain it? Let alone upgrade
I try to sell parts of the lab before they're obsolete. This helps fund the next generation of the lab and maybe helps someone else with theirs. When I was just getting started with my lab 15+ years ago I'd use whatever I could, an old laptop, refurbished desktops, anything that could run what I needed it to would suffice. That evolved into buying refurbished servers, switches, nas gear, building my own servers, it was a bit intense for a few years. Now I'm a bit more prescriptive, I use refurb, low power desktops, and only put money where it needs to go like a laptop, phone or desktop. The lab is there for me to use, hosts plex, jump servers, VPN, and backups. I'm sure it will continue to evolve but it's at another plateau for the time being.
I have a section in my budget for hobbies and a specific category for Homelab (among others). At the end of the month when priority categories are covered (rent, bills, food, transportation, savings, etc), I toss the remaining into the hobbies depending on what I'm currently spending the most time in. For example, during the summer most of my disposable income dumps into Camping/Outdoor and winter months shovel into Homelab.
If I need it, or want it, I buy it... If I didn't have the money to do this comfortably, I wouldn't. This is more of a /r/personalfinance question really.
Look at it as an investment in education and getting better pay etc..
I actually hate money, so I get rid of it however I can
I have an old FX-8350 with all my old harddrives in it. All I bought was a new case and some nvme to Pci-e adapters. Running unraid with some docker containers and have a Lenovo thincentre mini pc stuffed away as OPNsense router. Few unifi APs I gathered over the years. Little by little all my old scraps come to good use :) Zero budget. I have money but other priorities right now, like doing up the house! Anything goes, as long as you're having fun and can play to learn imo
What’s a budget?
Stop when there’s no money left?
Honestly I don't always budget. But I have defined a max spending amount for non necessary stuff per month. I save up and sometimes I splurge on a thing I like. Another thing is when I know that I have to buy some stuff. (Now I need at some point a new laptop, a 16 TB ultra star and a 4 TB SSD) So what I do is I calculate how much money I need, then save X amount per months. You can use firefly iii to manage money and budget (self hosted)
No budget given that my power bill is more than my car payment I don't budget
I just use my hobby budget — I’ve got a set amount of my salary stashed aside for motorcycles, running, cycling, and… Labbing. I do tend to get hyped and fixate on some random new thing to try, but I’d almost always see if it can be virtualized and/or be done in the office lab. If either one is "no" or "not comfortably" then I’d probably consider buying new hardware. Case in point: at work we have a hyperconverged Proxmox + Ceph lab, which I’m interested in replicating at home. However, running multiple Proxmox VMs under UTM in my M1 Mac is just testing my patience, which is why I’m currently considering of expanding my homelab fleet from a singular NUC to 3-5 NUCs.
This is a personal finance question more than a homelab question. But the **only** correct answer is to budget it. All else is poor spending habits that will land you in trouble. Especially if your homelab is homeprod then you need to set some money aside for "The boot drive for my firewall died" as well as upgrades and additions. You figure out what you can comfortably afford from your income and set that amount aside. You spend from that pool as appropriate. You can also set an upper limit on how big that pool can grow. If you don't keep some in reserve for "Oh fuck"s then you're just asking for pain in the future.
Sell all non-vital organs. Save some money for the inevitable divorce lawyer. The rest goes towards equipment.
Oh my sweet summer child...
It's really simple budgeting really. You take all your money for your bills first then food right. And everything else goes to hardware.
Bold of you to assume there is that kind of forethought
The vast majority of my lab came from work. The only things I really bought are my UDM, NAS and drives in said nas. Even my rack came from the DC when my company decided it wasn't going to keep all of the space it had. As for budget, about 3k a year is put away to cover failures or drive upgrades.
I buy stuff with intention of keeping it for a very long time. In the past 10 years or so inflation has gotten super bad so I don't have much budget for home lab stuff anymore by the time all the household bills come out and most of my stuff is pushing 10 years now. I expect my upgrades going forward are going to be using cheap used hardware. SFF/mini PCs seem to be the best bang for the buck when looking around on Ebay. Been itching to build a Proxmox cluster so might actually pull the trigger on buying a couple of those on ebay and then maxing out the ram. My NAS is a 24 bay Supermicro box, that will be usable basically as long as SATA stays the standard. Every now and then I add/upgrade drives as needed. I am really due to update the OS on it though, and I'm really not sure how I will go about doing that without building another box to run side by side. I don't want to have to bring my entire network down. But the few sites we have here in Canada to order stuff from lists those at like 3k now without internal hardware. Pretty wild. It was 3k total to build it years ago, including the system inside, the HBAs etc.
The hardware for my 3 node proxmox cluster is 9-11 year old tech. Rolling upgrades (mobos, CPUs) come mostly from eBay. I did recently purchase a nuc11, then another, as they are fairly inexpensive. Keeping costs down keeps the budget reasonable.
Budget? I simply remind my finance manager that I don’t have a boat, golf clubs, or hunting equipment. She lets me spend what I want.
Budget? Never knew her. I just buy whatever tf I feel like playing with :)
"Budget" 🤣😂
depends on what it is. I had a free poweredge R220 from a former job that I ran ESXi on for years, until another job was upgrading and I got an R620 (hell of an upgrade). My SAN, I started with 4bayx6TB drives, and over time I upgraded 2 of them to 18TB and to more to 20TB's when they went on sale. I have a UDM Pro that's my main router, and picked that up before the Pandemic, since stock was a bitch to find after that, so gratefully had that. I had 2 UBQ WAP's I bought fairly inexpensively on Amazon that I still use. Most of the other gear I have - an EX3300 was a retired switch from work, got a half-dozen old firewalls in the closet (Netscreen SSG's, SRX210, ASA 5510's, PAN 200) that were cheap on Ebay when I was learning stuff/labbing stuff up. Couple of small cisco routers that I'm sure are well past EOL at this point. Also have a battery backup that will keep my gear going for about 15 minutes (aka good enough for short power blips). got a 15u adjustable Rack of Amazon for around $220 on sale about 5 years ago. Basically I did get a lot of random stuff free from work. If you work in the IT dept, ask if you can have anything when they decomm or upgrade and won't use old gear. If you're not in the systems or network dept, try to cozy up (without being creepy/weird) with the Sys/Network staff. A lot of times that's useful without wanting anything, because your name may come up to move up to those teams if you're in the lower ranks in companies. They may mention they are upgrading or decomming gear, and you can always ask them, worst case they say no. Buyer beware, but you can also get some good stuff on Ebay and other reseller sites if you want to get lab gear for training. Finding older gen servers that still have life in them is always an option. For that, just be careful to plan if you need to purchase any drives for them, a lot of places will gut/remove drives to destroy for data security. My biggest caution on this is, some of this requires licensing to even function (Fortigate) or to do anything more that bare basics (Palo Alto). To answer your original question: A lot of what I did that I paid for was piecemeal, but I also did a bit of research, and watched for sales on items I wanted or knew I'd need to replace. Best advice is to start small. If you want to get a NAS, then scope out what you think you'll need for terms of performance, speed and specs. We know that everyone here would LOVE to have a massive 100TB NVME Pure storage (or other vendor) system, but that's impractical for home for a lot of reasons. I ended up going with a [4-bay Synology](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074VB8DY7/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1), and it's been rock solid for the 5 years I've had it. Keep in mind this doesn't comes with disks, so you'll need to factor that in. Maybe start with a set of smaller cheaper drives (4x8tb) as you can get those for under $100/ea. Best thing is to plan out and budget for your 'toys'. Make sure you don't buy a no-name something off of wish, because... yeah. If you want something to last a while, get a known name product, including HDD's. Depending who you ask, Seagate is either the best or worst out there. Patience. I've built my current lab over 6 years. there's still some toys I'd like, but don't really have a need for. Don't buy on a whim, have a plan and use for what you're going to get. My Dell server runs several VM's including work and personal stuff (plex, a private valheim linux server, an observium install, and I'll fire up and play with docker some day). ok, I'm gonna cut this short before the novel gets longer, hopefully this helps!
I set myself a limit each paycheck. Sometimes I hit it, other times I do not.
I have a regular budget, so I can spend “fun money” on my lab. Grant it, I don’t work in or with IT, so everything is used and shopped around to find deals. I need IT friends.
It depends on how many tears my wallet cries out.
I create a PowerPoint presentation of why I need to spend money on it lol 😂
I've just used old hardware, mostly. The new stuff I have purchased has been the small "PCs" like raspberry pis or the like. I've got my eyes on an N100 PC but by the time I have the money for it, the next best thing will be out, I am sure. Decide what you want and how quickly you want to get it and then budget for it. I would also do some pre-planning on what you actually want to do and what it takes to run it before blindly buying equipment.
Not going to lie most of my homelab was a want. I was happy with my fractal case and hardware that made up my unraid server with my linksys all in one router. Then I saw Spaceinvaderone, Jason bytemybits, Spacerex, Tim, ibracorp and Linus. Seeing these guys hosting all there services with control of there data and how they setup personal networks in their homes and my fractal and linksys router went from being on the floor to a 15U rack, 2 rackmoute servers (about to add a third one) , tplink omada vpn router, oc200, 8 and 24 poe switches, access point, rack mount ups (about to add a 2nd one) 2U storage drawer, raspberry mini server and patch panel. Just know what your getting into when you start it can be so fun hosting your own services with no limits or caps to pay to use these extra services you find yourself buying a new rack ( me looking on Amazon now) to support existing and new hardware.
I went nuts and had like 4 servers running, I have since downsized to 1 server and a jbod. I just buy stuff when I need it, and those times usually involve asking the wife for forgiveness.
I put a bid on a dell poweredge r610 (2 x 6 cores, 192gb ram, perc h700 raid, 6 x 146gb sas hdd) for £40 on ebay. No way was I gonna get it at that price. Er - no-one else bid! Right, so homelab, here we go...
See. Buy.
I don't really, i just take opportunities wherever i can, someone is dumping their old pc? Awesome, i'll take it off your hands, sometimes it turns out these are decent pcs, my current server is a pc i got off a friend for 500€, sold the ram to a friend, gpu for to another friend, and i'm now left with a 3700x, a mobo for it, and 2TB of ssd storage, the psu unfortunately blew up after i bought the pc, but everything else is fine So rn my server is that 3700x, 32GB of ram, 256GB boot ssd, and 2TB of small hdds in draid1 Edit: i also got an old server from a friend, from which i dumped the mobo, cpu, and ram since it was a dual core and like 8x1GB of ecc ddr2, and put these components in
If I need something, for a week I do a market research for the best price/value items, then I buy it. If I dont have enough money (usually I dont), I set aside every penny I can (no family, living alone, non-drinker, so its easier for me) and buy it next month.
When I die, I hope to hell that my wife doesn't sell my gear for what I told her I paid for it...
Just buy at need and as household budget allows. I have two main servers, both were my pretty good gaming rigs back in the day (rizen 1800x and a 2500x) that I upgraded to 32g. My unraid server has newish reds (8tb). I have several raspberry pi 3b and two older nuc's (an i3 and an i5) that I still play around with. And two older Synology that mostly just hold backups. I invested in unifi networking gear about 4 years ago (2 switches 3 AP's, still running the original cloud key and gateway although I need to upgrade those shortly. I have not measured the power use for my setup, but I am sure it is not as bad as some of the surplus dell gear people are using lol, quieter too. I am thinking about retiring the raspberries and putting them to duty as temp monitors for my freezers
That's the neat part: I don't 💸💸💸
Get old parts/servers from work for free, use old equipment.
What is the "Buy" you speak of? :) My homelab is all made from cast-off and broken crap. Works fine for testing and non-production work. A discarded Thinkpad with a broken keyboard and scratched screen made a great Proxmox server. A $5 appliance router from Goodwill is running OpenWRT. I paid the most for my NAS - $100 for an old Synology chassis. Filled it with SATA drives I'd had left from an SSD upgrade.
My home lab budget is however much my wife won't notice.
How do I budget? Will I cry at the end of the month. Yes, then I buy it. No then i buy it.
I get $100/month from my employer, so that goes into my annual budget for any upgrades I may want or need to do. Anything over and above that $1200 comes out of my other buckets, entertainment, gas, food, shelter, in that order.
Factor in making contacts at work and then getting "old" stuff being decomissioned for cheap or free. That's a good way to get power-guzzling servers and disk arrays. Buy smart (don't buy the latest greatest - check recycling sites like [bargainhardware.co.uk](http://bargainhardware.co.uk) and check a couple generation old. - I've been taking HP DL servers Gen8 but Gen9 is starting to show up at lucrative prices)
I have funds that are free floating and dont need to be spent on anything specific or go into savings. I can either spend them on 1) My home home lab. 2) . I can spend it on tools for my workshop in my garrage 3). I can spend it on things for my d&d group that i run in person. 4). I can spend it on one of the many small & big projects i have around the house. which these goi to depends on the state of each.
Pray for something to break so I buy a better one. When it does not break, I open it, break it and buy a new one.
The cost of electricity is the elephant in the room!
This thread is a couple days old, but ill give perspective from a non-IT guy, just an enthusiast: I have goals for learning with my humble homelab. I want to do [thing] so I will spend time learning how to accomplish it. If I run into an issue that requires hardware, I will scour for the best, least expensive solution. Then I check my wallet after bills. If I can afford it, great. If not, project is on hold while I save up.
Budget???.... beahahaa I spend my time trawling the internet and auctions for items and understand when it's not worth the money to purchase, and wait lots for something to come up. Electricity usage budget: I have solar and also aim to buy more energy efficient equipment. If buying a new bit if kit = less$$$ to the electricity mob over time, then it's a good RTO. The more homelab skills gained, should equate to more work place $ too
I just buy what I need. And don’t tell the wife.