Home Server or Cloud? Build, buy, or host?

For those wanting to run a home lab environment, there are many options available. However, a viable option these days is using the cloud to spin up a home lab. Which should you invest in, home server or cloud? This is a question many start asking when thinking about buying home lab gear that may add up to quite an investment. We talk about the pros and cons of running your lab on a home server or cloud environment and see which one might make the most sense for which use case.

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Introduction - 0:00
Talking about using a physical server in your home - 1:07
Talking about the advantages of a physical home server - 1:24
Physical tinkering with hardware and networking - 2:02
Organizations today are taking a hybrid approach - 2:25
Downsides to running a home server - 2:36
Active cooling for home lab environment - 3:00
Equipment failures, lifecycle management - 3:20
Capital Investment vs Operational Expense - lure of SaaS - 3:45
Looking at home lab resources online such as LabGopher - 4:23
What are your objectives? You must consider what you want to accomplish - 5:20
Reaching a threshold of a certain number of resources - 6:07
Introduction to running a home lab environment in the cloud - 6:25
Talking about free tier offerings in the public cloud - 6:55
Highlighting the Amazon AWS Free Tier offering - 7:12
Thinking about run time and how it will add up with many resources - 9:35
A third option? What about a hybrid approach? 10:25
Concluding thoughts on home server vs cloud - 11:46

Check out my home lab here:

Supermicro specific post:

VMware NSX home lab configuration:

[garrettmowrey]

I appreciate your videos and how you're not yelling or pushing loud messages down our throat. Keep up the great work!

[BSDOWNZ]

I use Hetzner for my cloud instances, HUGE amounts of CPU and RAM for less than the monthly cost of running my Dell PowerEdge R710.

[celetralabs]

Home servers really start making sense when you want to host a bunch of web apps, especially if they are side projects that don't get much traffic or make money. Realistically, an app that gets 10 visitors per day needs barely any compute to run. Cloud databases in particular are what pushed me to build my server. And these days we increasingly need GPUs to run AI models, and that's where cloud costs become astronomical.

[gabrielporto.mikrotik]

Well. As they say… “The cloud is still a rack somewhere”. Great video btw.

[Check_This_Out]

I am trying to choose the home server. I was almost convinced to buy dl380 gen 10 with 2x intel 6152 CPU and 256gb ram. But then I watched a lot of videos how this server boots and I was disappointed. The sound it makes during boot is unacceptable for my home. I was wondering does it that loud when you load them very hard? alternative has been found as hp z8 g4 with x2 intel 8160 and 256gb ram. research I did make me think that this is just as good as dl380 setup I mentioned previously. I would like to have a advice witch one is better and how loud they are. Thanks!!!

[Anasergun]

Actually it's depends on what you will run, as my server is basically a nas with pihole, it's much more cheaper to have it locally than on the cloud.

[alphabanks]

This was a fantastic video and I agree with you on the hybrid approach. I run a few home lab servers but I also consume Azure IAAS and PAAS. Also I would suggest looking into nested virtualization for example one of my servers is a dual E5-2650 v2 with 256 gigs of ram and tons of flash storage. I do lots of nested virtualization configs with ESXI. You are also correct in regards to refreshing hardware which is something I plan on doing over the next year.

[benzflynn]

Goes on and on like Casey Kasem used to - without telling us anything decisive and finishes on a grand platitude ("But whatever Elvis was, Elvis was loved.") that we can do it either way.
Didn't say Jack $**t on the capacity of our internet connection for a home server. Nothing on auxiliary server if #1 blows out. Nothing on having an experimental server if want to test out a new infrastructure. This guys acts like the only folks needing a home server are nerds holed up in their own house.

[jonathanandreoni]

I am looking to host 5TB database read only, including video streaming. Is it possible to run a server within reason? The information is proprietary and I don't want it leakes.

[RLE.]

I don't recommend it but for those of us with really old, like Dell r610 servers for example, if it's possible to get working a video for installing ESXi 8.0 on them would be awesome.

[ryan]

I have a Dell Server and I connect remotely to it. I want to connect a cloud to it. Do I have to use one of these cloudbase website or can I set up my own?

[christianchan]

Hi all, and what’s about nested environnements with a nuc as example ? Did you do avideo about that already ?
Thank you

[kawaiihikari]

In my opinion, cloud computing is the present and future of business

[seeking]

What is the difference between a home server and a cloud?

[LampJustin]

Why not do it like me and build a private cloud at home XD /sarcasm: off (not a good idea... OpenStack @home is a sinkhole)