His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.
Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals.
I run a Proxmox server with mirrored enterprise drives, a retired RTX 3080, and more containers than I’d like to admit, and I’d recommend self-hosting to almost anyone who’s curious. What I wouldn’t do is promise them it’ll save money, but a lot of home lab enthusiasts lead with that. It is everywhere in beginner guides, and for most people it doesn’t hold up once you take into account drives, backups, electricity, and time. Worse, it sets newcomers up to quit the first time they realize it's not worth it in terms of the dollars saved.
The hardware math doesn't beat the subscription
With a proper setup, you're probably saving very little
You can start self-hosting with nothing but a cheap mini PC, and it's true that a lot of containers don't require much compute at all, but storage is where the math starts to slip. If you care about the photos you’re moving off Google, you want redundancy, and a ZFS mirror or RAID 1 means buying two drives to get one drive’s worth of space. But then you have to consider that redundancy isn’t a backup, so you set up a proper 3-2-1 setup (three copies, two kinds of media, one offsite) that adds at least one more drive on top of that. Then, you add a UPS so a power flicker doesn’t take the pool down mid-write, and the hardware budget has doubled in the span of a few short months.
Then there’s electricity, which a subscription never bills you for. My own server shows how this adds up. It’s an older i7-6700K build with two mirrored 8TB enterprise SAS drives, an LSI HBA, and an RTX 3080 retired from gaming. I don't have a wall meter to measure exactly how much I'm spending, but I’d estimate it draws somewhere around 100 watts on an average day. Running around the clock, that’s close to 900kWh a year, which in my neck of the woods works out to roughly the price of a streaming subscription every month just to keep it powered. None of that hardware lasts forever, either. Drives wear out, and the box you build today won’t be the one you’re running in five years.
The costs nobody puts into a spreadsheet
They're not "hidden", but they're not the ones you think of first
Some costs don’t show up until you’re already committed, and remote access is a common one. Plenty of ISPs put customers behind carrier-grade NAT, which rules out simple port forwarding, so you end up relying on a tunnel or mesh VPN service. The free tiers cover a lot of people, but if you’d rather own that piece too, as I do with a self-hosted NetBird control plane, you’re renting a VPS to run it. Most reverse proxy guides also assume you’ve bought a domain, which is another added cost.
Then there's the cost of offsite backups, which, if you're lucky enough to have ownership of more than one physical location, could be as simple as storing a drive there that you routinely backup over the network. For most people, though, an offsite backup means a monthly storage subscription.
The cost that dwarfs all of these is time. Updates break things, containers need migrating, and certificate renewals fail at the worst possible moment. When your photo backup stops working, there’s no support line to call. You are the support line, and that can be the biggest cost of all.
Selling it as savings is how you lose beginners completely
It's much more useful to look at it from a different perspective
If you completely remove subscriptions and only take into account the static costs of self-hosting, it can eventually pay for itself. It's possible, but getting into it with that intention is probably getting into it for the wrong reasons.
The best reasons to get into self-hosting are the control it affords you, as well as the learning opportunity. Control means your photos live on drives you can touch, and no company can raise the price, shrink your storage tier, or decide that a feature you rely on is now a paid add-on. Learning pays off in knowing your way around Linux, networking, storage, and overall troubleshooting a lot better, and those skills can carry over to almost everything else you do with a computer.
There are cases where it can save you money, it's just not the best reason to start
Self-hosting is worth it. You get control over your data, freedom from services that change their terms whenever they feel like it, and skills that are genuinely useful. What you probably don’t get is a smaller bill. If you’re curious, start with hardware you already have, set your expectations around ownership instead of savings, and treat any money you save as a bonus.