A story how much it costs per month to have servers. In my case.

Actually I have couple servers. One of them that is the easiest to understand is a server that I use to provide this website. That being said, this website is not on provided everything on a single server, so the story is a bit more complicated.

Servers to provide this site.

I used to use AWS EC2 as a web server and RDS as a database server until couple years ago, but now I use VPS. Everything relating to the Anonyz runs on this VPS, but in case of this scale, it can be handled enough with SSD for the DB without the need for scaling or distribution. So, VPS is more than sufficient for now and maybe ever. This costs less than 50 U.S. dollars per month. Currently, it hasn't exceeded 80 U.S. dollars. When I was using AWS, it used to easily cost a few hundred dollars.

However, binary data like photos is exception.

Photos waste so much space on disk, so it's necessary not to place them on the VPS, it's better to place them on AWS S3. Sometimes there's someone who mind how much AWS S3 costs, but it wouldn't be as high as to mind if operating S3 just as a simple file server like me. Even at its highest cost, it's at the level of several tens of U.S. dollars per month. Oppositely, the fact that having access to nearly unlimited storage at this cost for personal use itself is quite awesome.

By the way, what can be a bottleneck the most running applications and databases on a VPS, is clearly the part as the database server. When the IO here is under load, the response time degrades significantly. This part is quite critical.

Servers running at home, and running for home.

I used to use a Raspberry Pi as a server at home. Homebridge server was running on that, and couple my own server applications that I made by myself were also running on that. But one day, the Raspberry Pi got broken actually. This is probably around 2020. At that time, due to the influence of COVID-19 and so on, I rarely took my MacBook Pro outside even I use MacBook Pro, a laptop computer. So I've run server processes on the MacBook Pro I use everyday and using it as a server as well since then. In my case, I don't even turn off or put the Mac to sleep.

I actually think about having a Mac mini dedicated for server purposes other than the MacBook Pro, but, I haven't encountered a situation where I urgently needed it. So, I still stick with this setup for now.

How about file storage server at home?

For the beginning, I don't use any file storage server at home nowadays. All the personal data I want to share via network is located on iCloud.

First of all, speaking of the basics, even back when I had set up a file server at home around high school age, I used to think "It would be great if I could access those files on the server when I'm away from home". With so many cloud storage options available now, there's really no reason not to use them. Having a file server at home comes with its own set of complexities like redundancy and the risk of data loss due to disk failure. Cloud storage services take care of all that hassle and more, so I have no wonder to opt for them.

So.

As Total, it currently costs around 75 U.S. dollars per month for iCloud as a personal file server, the VPS and the AWS S3. The VPS and the S3 could be called some parts of my business in my case, so I honestly can't say for sure whether this is expensive or not. However, comparing it to the times when we used to need to use dedicated servers costing couple hundreds of U.S. dollars or dedicated lines, able to cover all of personal usage with this level of cost doesn't seem that high. So what do you think of this?