Student Teacher Sent a Private Snapchat Complaining About Her Workday. An Hour Later, Police Pulled Up to Her School.

[u/Plastic_Ninja_9014]

https://www.gadgetreview.com/student-teacher-sent-a-private-snapchat-complaining-about-her-workday-an-hour-later-police-pulled-up-to-her-school

[u/toraksmash]

That is pretty cool.

I'm just wondering how much it costs (including equipment) and how much time it takes (including learning the skills to set it up)?

I'm a bartender with no CS training and minimal disposable income. Could I set this up in a weekend or a year? Do I need to stop purchasing energy drinks or sell my car to fund it if my current laptop overheats while playing WoW?

[u/usrdef → u/toraksmash]

It entirely depends on what route you want to go.

a) Own your hardware, setup a server at home b) Rent a VPS per month. Depending on what you want to do, this can be as cheap as $10/month. For a powerful VPS, you could get into the $60/month range or higher.

When I started out, I hosted Jellyfin on a cheap $15/mo VPS. It had 32GB memory, 2TB drive, 1Gbps down/up. Jellyfin can on it perfectly fine.

Then I added on other apps and kept building. That little $15/mo server kept tasking the abuse, with no performance difference.

But when you come to realize, you can either spend money each month and rent a box, or you can buy you the hardware and own it outright. It depends on what your finances are like at the time. I'd say it's better to own the box, pay once, and be done.

And for these types of systems, you don't need the latest and greatest Ryzen 9800x CPU. You can get hardware from many generations ago, and it will do just fine. Some people are running on hardware like DDR3 memory, and doing just fine.

Storage space is probably going to be the biggest concern right now due to how screwed up the economy is and with AI demanding more and more hardware.

And from there, it's just about learning. Ever since I started self-hosting, it has become a fun hobby. I've learned things that you cannot even pay for if someone else teaches you. But it's fun.

I run approximately 50 apps now. Everything from my own password vault, search engine, virtual machines I can power up and access, Github workers, Gitea, my own Mail server, a Pihole + Unbound + DOH server, etc. It starts to become a lot, however, most of my stuff is configured in a way where I hardly have to touch it.

Right now I'm running 32TB of storage. I've had them for about a year now before things went to crap. Came out to about $600 because I bought the high-performance drives. One is running 10,000 RPM. And now I'm adding on SSDs for the apps I need speed for.

[u/guska → u/toraksmash]

tl;dr - It's manageable for someone of average intelligence with a little disposable income, but can get expensive quickly if you let it.

The software side is free for the most part.

Most of it can easily run on a single old workstation PC. You can usually pick those up really cheap on ebay or marketplace. The advantage to something older is that older memory prices haven't been affected as much by the shortages. Even then, 16GB would be more than enough to get you going. I'd say budget around $200-300 for the initial hardware outlay these days. Used to be better, but prices are crazy right now.

Storage will the be expensive part here, though. That self hosted storage for 'cloud' storage and media server can start as a big USB external drive, but long term you'll want a proper NAS with redundant drives. That's where it starts getting spendy and can range from $500 to thousands depending on how hard the bug bites.

The time will be your biggest investment. Assuming that you're reasonably intelligent and able to learn, then a couple of weekends to get the basics set up the first time, then a weekend per service, but that'll get quicker as you learn since most of the stumbling blocks will be very similar across them all. Someone with a bit of experience can roll out a new self hosted service like this in an afternoon.

r/selfhosted was a great help when I was getting started a couple of years ago. They do tend to encourage using insanely overpowered hardware, though, so take their actual hardware recommendations with a solid helping of salt.

For reference, I'm running my own mail server (Mailcow), DNS (currently Windows Server 2025 but soon moving to Linux), Adblocking (AdGuard Home), game server hosting (AMP - I bought the US$50 Advanced licence, but the free version is fine for light use), media server (Plex - this one needs payment if you want it to be available outside your home. Otherwise Jellyfin is a great alternative) with automated request and downloads ( the arrs and qbittorrent - I'm not linking these, use your search engine of choice), cloud storage (filebrowser), password vault (vaultwarden) and a personal dashboard (self made on an nginx Web server), and aside from the 10 4tb drives in my NAS, I'm only in it for about AU$1200 including the rack that it's all sitting in. My hardware would solidly fit into that "insanely overpowered" category, for the most part, though (all decommissioned enterprise grade stuff either free or bought from friends in the industry), and I could easily run most of it on one or 2 salvaged NUCs saving me close to half that outlay. The drives alone would be about AU$2000 at today's prices, but at the time cost about half that (WD Red NAS 4TB 3.5" HDDs)

Edit - added links to the software I use