i have two old PCs refurbished as Ubuntu servers running the latest LTS version.
machine the first:
- Taskwarrior
- Taskserver
- Docker and Docker Compose
- local media and stuff on a 2TB NAS
machine the second:
- Docker and Docker compose
- Jitsi Meet server
- Rustdesk server
coming soon:
- PiHole
- Unbound DNS
- Plex (maybe)
- Mealie (possibly with a dedicated ancient iPad that will live in the kitchen)
- BirdNET-Pi
also possibly a home weather station built out of a Raspberry Pi 4B that is on order; i love the idea of having one of these in my backyard to track our microclimate.
If you want to judge whether energy consumption is a waste, you have to consider the value of what's consuming that energy.
Keeping the internet running? A global storehouse of humanity's collective knowledge available to almost everyone around the world for free? The ability to communicate in real time with your family on the other side of the world, or coordinate protests in every major city in your country, or host a live meeting that would have required fifty people to fly cross country into a single zoom room?
Yeah, data farms could become more efficient and sustainable, as could we all. But I don't begrudge the power they spend one bit. 2% of global energy consumption is low for the benefit.
Compare to Bitcoin, which accounts for 0.5% of global energy consumption, and benefits no one and nothing...
I'm not sure that the combined energy consumption of the aggregate financial system is less than 0.5%, but it does, unlike Bitcoin, provide utility, not withstanding any reasonable objection to the fairness of this system.
tbh i don't worry too much about datacenters because they can be built under the land, under ice, alone in the desert full of solar panels and so on. the heat in the winter can also be used to heat houses if it's in the city..
the sad part is that most of that energy is used for bullshit tasks for surveillance capitalism.
I guess it depends on your definition of "self hosting" but I'm in the process of migrating a lot of my services to a remote vps on vultr. It doesn't make much sense to have a big, hot server running at home that needs capacity to cope with peaks but isn't used 99% of the time.
Sharing server resources with other virtual servers is the most significant least pain to benefit ratio action I can think of.
All that will really be left at home is a torrent client and gerbera (upnp) instance which can happily run on a NUC with an nvme. gerbera won't do any transcoding so the load is negligible.
Self-hosting
Hot