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).
While I don’t agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.