How much Power would I need? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Batchade_ · 2023-12-26 21:25 How much Power [or money do I need to pay] do i need If I want one Server, which runs a Pi-hole (or something similar), a Gameserver [as an example Minecraft with some mods, 20 Players, without problems] and a E-Mail server. And would it be better (cost efficient) to use 3 Server for this purpose? I am new to this topic, so if something does not work or doesn't even make sense, tell me about it! Edit: With "Power" i dont mean electricity, i mean like hardware performance. My bad ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TheVortuks · 2023-12-26 21:33 Selfhosted email is IMO a terrible idea - you’ll deal with a lot of problems. About power consumption - it depends on CPU and other peripherals. The same question could be like this, how much fuel will I use if I travel around 250KM. It depends on machine, you can be there faster, slower and with different fuel efficiency results depending on car. Hope it helps. Question for you, what hardware do you have/plan to have ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- foefyre · 2023-12-26 21:36 Amd epic 32 core cpu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- pm_me_pcb_photos · 2023-12-26 21:46 Maybe 50W full load with recent hardware, or 500-800W if you use a boat anchor old server. The cost depends a lot where you live, some people in the US/Canada pay like 3 cents per kWh, some people in the EU pay over 50 cents per kWh. So, it depends.. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ArcRust · 2023-12-26 21:56 The bedroom with my NAS, and a few other pieces of equipment (lights, bedroom fan etc.) uses 160wh. Moving out to a month that's an average of 115kwh. That room does also have my wife's PC and other things. But the room as a whole costs me 34$ a month. I'm in Cali on a tiered electric plan. It's expensive, I'm guessing it'll be cheaper for you. So youll probably spend less than 30 bucks a month. Hope that helps 3 servers would probably be less efficient. They draw power whether being used or not. One server doing nothing uses less power than 3. if they were running all the time at high power, then it would probably be better to have 3 seperate because more power means more heat, which would be less efficient. It's hard to say exactly where it crosses the point of 3 being better than 1, but I'd guess it's high. Unless you're planning a whole data center, it's probably negligable ---------------------------------------------------------------------- pusillanimouslist · 2023-12-26 22:01 As another commenter said, don’t self host email. It can be done, but it’s a notoriously annoying thing to do, and definitely shouldn’t be the first thing you consider. Pihole takes up effectively zero resources comparatively, so the real question is what it takes to host that mine craft server. And I have no idea how to estimate that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- borschelrh · 2023-12-26 22:05 It can be done on small SBCs or small mini PCs. Personally, I run on a Beelink SBC running a Celeron in a fanless box. It was a cheap Chinese mini PC and runs Linux MX-23. I have 4 4TB external HDDs on it and run Pihole, qbittorrent, and Plex. It uses very little power and I use this as my media server and Samba storage server as well. I also run several even smaller SBC for such things as Adguard Home, Pihole, Octoprint for 3 3D printers and these all run on separate Pi Zero boards (or Orange PI zero boards). I have 3 sprinkler controllers also running on pI Zero boards as well. You can do a lot with these and none use much power at all. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- null-count · 2023-12-26 22:10 Have a look into Proxmox. Its an OS that specializes in virtual machines. So one PC or server with proxmox can emulate a dozen or more virtual servers and share resources. You could have 1 debian VM for each thing you want to host. If you do go the virtualization route, the bottleneck is RAM so get as much as your Mobo can support lol. Self-hosting email is a full-time job Consider about 2 gigs ram and 1 cpu core per user of the MC server. Depends a lot on each user's view distance. Also, your internet may become the bottleneck with enough players ---------------------------------------------------------------------- officiallyStephen · 2023-12-26 22:15 I’d recommend AdGuard home dns over PiHole, it supports DNS over HTTPS so even your DNS a requests are encrypted. Edit: typo ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2000nesman · 2023-12-26 22:16 Tbh, you could probably by an older mini PC off ebay and be fine. They can run for about $100 and you could throw ubuntu. For minecraft it can depend on if it's modded or not since a lot of mods generally require more ram to run, but if it's a mini pc you can always upgrade that later on too. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 2000nesman · 2023-12-26 22:17 It will depend on if it's modded or not. Some modded servers can take 16GB of ram... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Batchade_ · 2023-12-26 22:22 My bad, with Power i dont mean Power consumption like Electrcity, more like hardware Performance. I've just been thinking about setting up a server, but as a beginner, I don't really have a clear idea of all the things one can do with it, especially in terms of what would be worthwhile for a private individual. That's why I've been considering what I might theoretically want to do with it in the future. I was thinking of primarily using a physical server, but I'm aware that stable game servers, in particular, can require substantial resources. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Cynyr36 · 2023-12-26 22:24 /r/admincraft/ for the Minecraft server question. But any reasonably modern mini pc with enough RAM will be fine. I'm pretty sure the main consideration is single thread performance and ram. Dns for home use is basically 0 resources. Email can be done, but you'll probably be black holed by every major email provider. So if this is for internal services to send you pings it'll work great, otherwise just use gmail, outlook.com, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- BCIT_Richard · 2023-12-26 22:42 This, you don't need multiple machines, even if you need multiple platforms, there's no reason to not run Hypervisors even in Homelabs these days. I have a production and development environment, both are a single server with proxmox as my type 1 hypervisor, production runs Unraid(which manages and hosts my production services) in a VM without any issues. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dymas-CZ · 2023-12-26 22:47 I was hosting a small modded minecraft server for 10 ppl a NAS and some docker containers (PiHole included) on my old laptop running ubuntu. Think it was some old Dell Latitude Core i5, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 4TB USB3.1 Drive. Had it running for 2 years with no problems. But think twice about selfhosting a mail server, its a pain in the a\*\*. If you just want a custom domain for your mail that is not a problem with some providers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Morgennebel · 2023-12-26 22:55 I run Minecraft (itzu docker) with mods on a Wyse 5070 pimped to 32 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. Pulls 5.75W. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- heydroid · 2023-12-26 23:33 It all depends on the Game server. I believe Postfix email can handle 90,000 emails/hour on a pentium cpu. I'd speck out whatever systems you want where the gameserver takes about 50% of the resources, this will give you overhead for future projects. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- peacefulshrimp · 2023-12-27 01:15 You mean DNS over HTTPS? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- officiallyStephen · 2023-12-27 01:23 Haha yes 😂 it’s late ---------------------------------------------------------------------- No_Dragonfruit_5882 · 2023-12-27 04:49 Make sure you get a dual socket Board..... /s ---------------------------------------------------------------------- spanky_rockets · 2023-12-27 05:08 I run my pihole on a pi3b and my unmodded Minecraft server on an Optiplex 3060 running Ubuntu. Both are very lightweight applications I would say, generally speaking. I wouldn’t go purchasing any extra hardware if you already have an old desktop or laptop laying around. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- housepanther2000 · 2023-12-27 07:12 It's okay to do email as a learning experience. This is what I want to do. I have a throwaway domain that I'm going to press into service just for the learning experience. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Larkonath · 2023-12-27 07:44 50w full load is mobile CPU territory. I have a workstation with an AMD Ryzen 5800x, full load is between 100 and 150w. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nassiel · 2023-12-27 09:03 Hi, why is a full time job?? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jaredearle · 2023-12-27 10:03 Self-hosting email requires constant vigilance. Keep your filters up to date, keep on top of exploits, keep blocking probes. Basically, email is a liability as bots are constantly looking for servers to exploit to send spam. You need to make sure that you’re 100% secure, and the day you get exploited (when, not if) you need to get your IP removed from the dnsbl databases, all of them, and make sure your domain reputation isn’t hurt. Oh, and on top of all that, you need to make sure the emails you send into the void are treated as reputable. You’ll be wondering why nobody on live/hotmail/outlook addresses ever gets your mails, then you realise none of the big mail providers have anything resembling support for anyone sending mails to them. All in all, mail has got to the point that even those of us with three decades of experience just prefer to hand it off to someone whose full-time business is email. If you still want to send emails from your homelab or self-hosted server, *and you actually need it to arrive at its destination*, get Sendgrid or Mailgun to do it for you. Oh, and if you’re running a mail server for other people to use, you’ll understand in a week why you shouldn’t. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jaredearle · 2023-12-27 10:05 Put the notification emails on free sendgrid if you rely on getting them. Trust me. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- itachi_konoha · 2023-12-27 10:25 It's too late to apologise. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Charming_Sheepherder · 2023-12-27 11:53 I've done email for years and I'm about to hand it off. staying whitelisted is a pain. bots are relentless. home isp probably have it blocked anyways. mine did. it's against the tos. so I use a vps. and if they migrate or change ip for some reason it's back to whitelisting with the spam filters, Google, etc etc over and over ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Brakels · 2023-12-27 15:41 Start small, install Proxmox on whatever hardware you can get cheap/free, and use Proxmox’s monitoring tools to see what kind of demands different OS/software combinations put on it. Note when something needs more RAM or is running at 100% of allocated cores, then plan a more powerful build around it. Self-hosting is about the journey. It is totally valid if that journey turns out not to be fun for you, in which case you will appreciate why you would pay someone else to run services for you.