this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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How do you afford all this?
I’m gonna guess incremental increases over the years, and snapping up used enterprise stuff on fire sale. It’s actually pretty feasible to do if you know where to look for this stuff.
More or less exactly this. Most of my servers are company decommission (some companies have a strict upgrade cycle, and I even have like 3 more "spares" sitting around). I've found some government liquidation here and there as well which has been great for resale to recoup some of what I spend. I have something like 4TB of Ram sitting in a box somewhere that I should sell somewhere...
Some stuff was "decent" ebay buys. A few items I just had to pony up for. Battery backups was mostly paid at full msrp, but has been worth it. HDDs are mostly "refurb" and built up over time as well, which is why raidz2 and several spares in the zfs pool.
But yeah, about 10 years of building it up. I use it as my playground for professional development, and it's helped prove a lot of what I say on my resume.
When you have a functional setup like this, and can show that to potential employer. It's been the best sole investment I've ever made. It's netted me more money in contracts by many many times what I put into it.
Edit: and saved me from countless "cloud" privacy violations, data breaches, etc...
Edit2: Recurring costs is basically energy. The rack itself uses about 90kWh a day (about $5/day for me), cooling and all. My solar install creates just about that much per day as well so that's all offset (and if I ever move my equipment into a colo, my house will basically have no electric bill at all). Internet is $165 a month, which is fucking great IMO... VPN is paid every 3 years or whatever that cycle is on. If I was to just take the non-replaceable stuff (about 20tb worth of data at last check, and a bunch of lxc containers) and put that on a VPS somewhere I'd be paying at least 10x what I do now in someone else's datacenter, forget that that's a recurring monthly cost.
Edit3: Just because it is likely useful information for SOMEONE out there... If you know that your setup takes 10kWh a day, you need to account for another %50 for cooling, so you should actually expect 15kWh in that usecase. My actual rack uses ~60... 30 more is cooling. I actually have all my power usages broken out in a sankey graph... Even goes further to break it down on a per server usage as well, but I can't take a reasonable screenshot that doesn't show personal information. This is 24 hours of usage (specifically 04/30, yesterday) and "garage dedicated" is what the A/C unit I have in the bottom of my rack is plugged into.
I’m in an apartment currently; the footprint I’m willing to allocate to a server amounts to a full-size ATX case, and a bunch of small ebay’d lenovo thin clients (plus a handful of rPi’s and similar SBCs). When I finally am able to get a house with some actual project space, I aspire to build something approaching your setup over time.
I started on cluster (8) of rpi3b and a Synology NAS 10 years ago... prior to that was just storing it all on random hdd (harddrive toaster was alway present and loaded on my desk) and on my computer. these days you can get those little intel n100 or n150 boxes for pretty cheap too. There's a lot of options, and a lot of mature software tech to make it all work well together.
It's been enough to just seed behind a VPN at this scale? I'd like to do something similar one day at smaller scale but I'm a bit fearful.
In my youth I used to operate my own and admin on other ROM sites. The smart move then was Asian server hosts who would take anonymous payments with no personal info attached to the accounts. But we were still worried of Nintendo, keeping safe was a bit scary.
But they never went after us. It was easier for them to just go after people hosting in the USA under their real names.
But that's centralized, different ballpark from p2p. I used to use mullvad for torrents until they removed port forwarding.
I think that question really hinges on "what vpn provider you choose to use". Honestly... People don't hit me as hard as I wish they would.
From earlier. ~64TB of that is on my VPN'd hosts. I know it's a bottleneck by it's very nature... the highest I've seen all 4 peak at the same time was just over 3gbps aggregate...
The VPN I use is a no log vpn... and I choose an exit point that's outside of my country. So at the very least would require coordination between 2 countries, and a provider that has nothing to give up...
At that point it's all about the trackers that you're a part of.
Cool thanks for info.
Probably years of passion. Possibly a career related to this stuff.