4 ms·

I use far less than 15W using an old laptop or RasPi their cost is negligible over their useful lifetime

• 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  The 15W doesn't account for hardware. As soon as you add in hardware (and redundancy), you're looking at a lower budget. If i was to self host something similar, i would use a server (could be RPi4) with a set of 2x6TB drives in RAID1(for availability), and a remote backup somewhere (so another 6TB drive). The hardware cost of a single 6TB (Seagate Ironwolf 6TB, €202 at Amazon) harddrive could pay for 3 years of Family 365. So we're looking at 6 years of Family 365 to buy the harddrives alone (and 9 months more if you buy a RPi 4). I'm not counting the backup drive as you'll need that as well even if running in the cloud. Assuming a lifespan of 5 years, and an operating power of 5W average, you're looking at 44 KWh per harddrive per year, so 2x44x5 = 440 KWh over 5 years, or €194 (at €0.44/KWh). So the total cost of running your own setup over 5 years would be: €404 2 x 6TB harddrives €194 power consumption (not counting server power) Thats €598 for 5 years, or €119.5 per year, and that's also assuming no hardware breaks down. Compare that to the €60 that Family 365 costs per year.