Past me said some stuff, so now present me should address it.

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Back in 2022, fresh off of the back of many months of heavy AWS immersion, I made the bold claim that AWS was better for self-hosting than home-labs… while hosting this blog off of my homelab. Just to summarize that article, here are the points I make:

1. Energy costs affect the average person more than the cloud provider

   • They also are signed onto much longer/more concrete energy deals so when prices do go up, they don’t feel it as hard.

2. During this time where energy prices are shooting up, cloud providers are putting out more and more energy efficient servers that are usually cheaper, or better for the same money.

3. Even if the cloud cost more money for you to run, it can also make you more money if you decide to go full send and learn the tools of the trade in a more formalized way, such as with the AWS Solutions Architect certification path.

So what does present me think?

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1. Well… True. Let’s take a look at the old chart:

What about now?

So inflation has hit a lot of things, but energy thankfully isn’t really one of them. Funny enough it’s actually gone down since my article from 2023. With energy prices roughly stabilising for as long as they have, the advantage that cloud providers had of potentially longer-standing energy price fixes may not apply.

2. This very much is true still, but servers featuring 14nm and even 7nm CPU’s have got really cheap now on the used market, so us homelabbers are catching up. I’ll talk more about that in just a second.

3. This is more true than ever still, but I still find day in day out that having ’traditional’ infrastructure knowledge is still absolutely paramount. With the job market in the mid 2020’s being as poor as it has been, the days of being able to get a couple cloud certs and expect a decently paying job are long gone.

Can clouds inflate?

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Going back to inflation, what about the cloud provider instance prices?

2023:

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2025:

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Wow. Well, at least we know Amazon shareholders are loving life I guess?

As for the other providers, it’s mostly on a good trend. Hetzner with some absolutely unbelievable pricing, and they do provide a good service on top of it. If we also included data transfer costs, hetzner would look like an even better deal with 20TB included per month.

Let’s get to the bare metal.

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One of the, quite frankly overrated, reasons you’d go with renting a cloud server is the lack of capital expense (capex) and you’re instead moving to a lower recurring expense instead. As soon as you decide you no longer need that machine, you can easily get that expense gone. What if we flip that on its head though and look at what things would look like if we look at an example of a homelabber that’s purchased one of those fancy ‘XD’ servers? (Xtra Dense? probably)

Yeah… thankfully I got the partner approval for that one. Let’s take a look at the specs:

Chassis - Dell R740xd
CPU - 2x  Xeon Gold 6230 (Total 40 Cores 80 Threads @ 2.1-3.9Ghz)
RAM - 768GB DDR4 2666Mhz
Storage - 6x 1.92TB SAS 12G SSD
PSU - 2x 1100w Platinum Hot-Swap

Cost - £3560

Initially, that sounds ridiculous. Over £3000 on a computer that you’re not even using to make money with!? There’s a reason. Let’s take a look at that compared to the yearly cost of the closest AWS machine I can find.

That would be the dl2q.24xlarge with the following specs:

CPU - 96 virtual CPU cores
RAM - 768GB
Storage - Err... none

Cost - £41000

Yep, that’s £41000 per year. That’s more than some pretty damn good engineers make up north. Right okay, unfair comparison, that one has a 100gb NIC, and has all the AWS bells and whistles. Let’s bring things closer to reality. I’ll google ‘bare metal server hosting UK’ in an incognito tab and check the first result.

After skipping past the 4 sponsored results, I get to fasthosts.

Oh… nevermind. Their most expensive machine at £720 a month has less than a fifth of the RAM mine does. Onto the next then. Finally, a host that provides real servers, OVH! Right, let’s look at those specs and price per year:

CPU - Xeon Gold 6438M (32 cores, 64 threads, 2.2-3.9Ghz)
RAM - 512GB DDR5 ECC 4800Mhz
Storage - 2x1TB NVME + 6x1.92TB NVME 

Price - £10368

So again, not quite apples to apples since it’s a generation newer, and the RAM is a bit less, but it was only £200 a month more or so for 1TB RAM.

The one thing I will concede is that Hetzner’s server auctions are incredible value. I can’t quite find a close enough match, but for an Epyc 7502P machine with 14TB SSD storage and 512GB RAM it’s only £144 a month! That does put my purchase to shame to an extent, but at least my machine is properly mine I guess?

As a final point, I’ll say that it’s quite amazing that my point regarding automation & deployment from my last article is almost completely moot. The proxmox provider for Terraform is at the point where I’m more than happy using it in my lab, and I’d like to think at least some places are rolling it in prod. Colour me impressed!

To Conclude

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Is it a great time to be an Amazon shareholder? Yes! Is AWS better than on-prem for self-hosting? No!

Yeah… I don’t know what happened to their pricing, so I’ll rephrase the question:

Is a hosting provider better than on-prem for self-hosting? Depends on your scenario, budget and compute needs. Mostly though, if you have the space and don’t mind potentially having an awkward conversation with your partner or parents, it can be an incredibly rewarding experience. No web UI button press can beat physically wiring your own machine up and hearing it whirr away for the first time.