At the end of the last year, me and my wife decided to track our expenses with a simple Google Sheet file. After only some weeks i've realized how much i spent in the year for some services that recursively paid.

About that, there's my short list of services and relative expenses:

  • Webserver for Customer's Beta Testing (about 65 €/month)
  • Supabase Pro for some of my app's database (abou 25€/month)
  • Zapier for some automations for my Customers (about 20€/month)
  • Calendly to allow book my time for consulting or appointments (about 10€/month)

Yes. It's over 100€ per months.

So, after some thinking about, i've decided to start to self host some of this services.

How to prevent a lot of money

Self-hosting can be expensive if you decide to buy a VPS, but, if you've a static-IP connection, you can self-host with a really good server without spent a lot.

I've view some videos on YouTube and i've found a pair of channel that explain self-hosting and info about that. Mainly the channel that i've follow is Hardware Heaven, that have tried a lot of PC, Rasperry and something else as use for self-host.

My choice terminated to HP EliteDesk 800 G3. I've found this one on eBay for 65€ (less than i've paid monthly for services) and i bought it. This mini PC has an i5 of 6th generations, 8GB of RAM and a NVME with 128GB. At home i had an old 1TB SATA SSD not used, so, after G3 arrived i've replaced the NVME with this one.

My thinking is how much i'll spend for electricity, so i've decided to get from Amazon a electricity tracker and i've surprised about on many Watt it use. G3 has a power supply for 35W, but, with some containers loaded and active, he use only 5W.

5W/h x 24h x 30 days x 0.35€/kW = 1,008 €

So, with my electricity cost of 0.35€ per kW i will spend around 1€ per month! Ok, move on!

Services replacement

Mine main requirement is to create a server to move my customer's websites. With DigitalOcean i had a VPS with 4CPU, 8GB of RAM and 240GB, with my new Home Server i've the same specs but a lot of GBs than my old VPS.

Moreover, i can create a separately containers with Docker and that's be safer. This process, is really simple. I've used Nginx Proxy Manager to manage the containers on the public network, that's really fast to apprend and to move in production.

I've replaced Zapier with N8N. That's a really incredible tool, as same or better than Zapier for my experience.

Supabase not changed, but i move all my databases to mine installations.

At last, i'm moved from Calendly to Cal.com. Fast and almost similar to Calendly.

Conclusions

There's a lots of possibilities to improve my works with self-hosted service. I can move my Airtables Docs to Teable, move my not importants websites stats on Umami and, why not, try to replace Brevo with ListMonk or Plunk.

My suggest is to try your self-host and enjoy!