I have a symmetric 10 gbps connection at home. I have an EPYC machine that plays host to a number of virtual machine guests for various tasks. One of them is ru

I have a symmetric 10 gbps connection at home. I have an EPYC machine that plays host to a number of virtual machine guests for various tasks. One of them is running opnsense to be my router. It's not fast enough to route at line speed, but it's close enough that I don't care. A consumer router or a pi or something would be far slower, and I would start to care. Having a tolerably powerful computer doing this means that it's also my web server for several sites, stores local backups and handles offsite backups, acts as my print server, and hosts a Windows virtual machine for using proprietary software (e.g., for my label printers or firmware updates for random widgets like my Lutron light system). Quiescent appears to be something in the neighborhood of 40 watts. It's not nothing, but it's acceptable, especially for the utility. I don't pay for a VPS because I have the bandwidth and the capacity to self-host everything I want. I spend $8/mo in electricity to run that machine, and that will drop to zero when my solar array and battery become functional. If the power consumption were 5x worse I would probably not have gone this route.