More or less exactly this. Most of my servers are company decommission (some companies have a strict upgrade cycle, and I even have like 3 more “spares” sitting around). I’ve found some government liquidation here and there as well which has been great for resale to recoup some of what I spend. I have something like 4TB of Ram sitting in a box somewhere that I should sell somewhere…

Some stuff was “decent” ebay buys. A few items I just had to pony up for. Battery backups was mostly paid at full msrp, but has been worth it. HDDs are mostly “refurb” and built up over time as well, which is why raidz2 and several spares in the zfs pool.

But yeah, about 10 years of building it up. I use it as my playground for professional development, and it’s helped prove a lot of what I say on my resume.

When you have a functional setup like this, and can show that to potential employer. It’s been the best sole investment I’ve ever made. It’s netted me more money in contracts by many many times what I put into it.

Edit: and saved me from countless “cloud” privacy violations, data breaches, etc…

Edit2: Recurring costs is basically energy. The rack itself uses about 90kWh a day (about $5/day for me), cooling and all. My solar install creates just about that much per day as well so that’s all offset (and if I ever move my equipment into a colo, my house will basically have no electric bill at all). Internet is $165 a month, which is fucking great IMO… VPN is paid every 3 years or whatever that cycle is on. If I was to just take the non-replaceable stuff (about 20tb worth of data at last check, and a bunch of lxc containers) and put that on a VPS somewhere I’d be paying at least 10x what I do now in someone else’s datacenter, forget that that’s a recurring monthly cost.