It costs what?!?, to run a server.
The TL;DR of it all is about $21.00 a month. Now the questions really is how did I get to that number. I bought a BN-LINK WiFi Heavy Duty Smart Plug Outlet. This has a pretty rudimentary app but it was enough to give me that data that I needed. Unfortunately gathering the data had to be done manually and methodically. There is no way to transfer real-time data, it gives a momentary glimpse of what is happening when the app is open. So I set a schedule and took a screenshot when I opened the app top track the data. A classmate of mine, Brandon Roots and I were talking about this issue. He did a tremendous amount of research regarding these issues. He was able to hack the plug and flash new code to it. This enabled him to gain access to real-time granular data. Please take a few minutes and head over to his blog post for a very detailed set of instructions, https://brandonroots.com/2021/03/11/measurement-project/.
The app I use did give daily usage in kWh in a graph format which allowed me to check the accuracy of the data I was recording through my screenshot process. Below are the screenshots from my process
After 11 days of collecting data I took to a spree sheet to calculate and make a few observations. The above visualization shows a few different pieces of data. Daily kWh represented in purple hexagons, notice this starts of being higher than the Running Total kWh which is represented by the orange hexagons. Daily Data Server is in green and just for comparison Daily Data Workstation (the workstation was on a different plug). I was seeing very little variation for the server’s daily kWh draw so I decided to test if the load of the server contributed to the energy draw. For this test I increased the load on the server by running a full system backup of the workstation with one, two, and three different HD videos being streamed through a PLEX media server to three different devices. Surprisingly the daily kWh didn’t really change but the current draw did. Under normal operation the server was drawing never more than 991 mA however, under the load the draw increased to 1039 mA. What I did find out is that my workstation can draw up to 1300 mA while preforming graphic (rendering) heavy tasks, thankfully I don’t have my workstation running 24/7.
So back to the first line of this blog, it costs about $21.00 a month to run the server. The cost to build the server was about 3k, and I’ve needed to replace one of the hard disks a year since I built it in 2014 to the tune of about $100 a piece. So it can get a little pricey BUT I have approximately 64 TiB of usable space with dual redundancy, in contrast that would cost about $10,000 a year with a service provided by a very large company that sells lots of good online…
Raw data below.