What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?
I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.
Edit: I feel the need to reduce both – the resources, to host multiple things on one system, and cost, to buy/pay for multiple systems. Currently, I have 2 ARM VPSes and 1 old MacBook Air as a home server.
- Use sqlite instead of Postgres, MariaDB
- Avoid enterprise software (Kubernetes, Elastic Search)
- Only use projects with efficient programming languages such as Go, Rust, etc.
- Try to run things bare metal
- Lookout for projects which name themself minimal or light-weight
I use a Raspberry Pi 2 to self host a Dashboard written in Rust (Axum), a RSS reader called yarr and a music streaming server Navidrome. The latter two are written in Go and very resource efficient. The electricity bill should be under a Euro a month (6.4W max power consumption).