Costs
These are all ran on the smallest instance in Digital ocean ($5/month), there’s barely enough RAM and it’s definitely the bottleneck.
1 vcpu
1 GB ram
25 GB included storage
20 GB attached storage (extra)The 20 GB attached storage ($2/month) is just so that it’s easier for migrations. There’s also automatic managed backups for 20% of the instance cost ($1/month), which brings the total operating cost to 8USD per month. Using google’s conversion rate, it totals to ~130SGD per year. Not exactly dirt cheap, but I guess it’s as good as it gets for now.
Reason for going full cloud was pretty straight forward when looking at the cost-analysis.
The plan was to use a low-power device as my server, which at this point of writing would be something like an Intel NUC. Looking at the power consumption of a typical NUC, it averages around 5 to 25 watts, so taking a safe estimate of 17.5 watts on average ((5 + 25) / 2), it amounts to 153.3kHh/year. Looking at the cost of electricity in Singapore, I took the conservative estimate of $0.20/kWh.
Total electricity: 30.66SGD/year
The barebones kit for Intel NUC6CAYH as of this writing retails at 129USD (roughly 174.72SGD). This excludes the cost of SSD and RAM. Even if I got the cheapest components, it’ll still add up to roughly 350SGD. Adding the cost of electricity, running the server myself right now would cost 380SGD.
380SGD is enough for me to run my cloud instance for 2.92 years. Not to mention that I have to maintain the hardware, network and software myself. It just made no sense for me to replace my server and run it myself. However, this is purely because my use cases doesn’t require any high powered or high bandwidth workloads. Your mileage may vary.
In the meantime, I would just continue to run my own servers using old, secondhand hardware just for me to play around and test new technologies.