Why do people buy mass servers for homelabs, can they achieve profit? Ir what do they usually do

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I see people posting big home server racks and have always been curious

In: Technology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You have to keep in mind that technology like servers can lose value extremely quickly.

Businesses upgrade their equipment regularly. You might think that once you bought a server it would essentially free to keep it running, but electricity and cooling and them simply taking up space mean that after a few years it can easily be cheaper to turn them off and buy new ones than to keep them around. (Especially if the business is smart enough to only use hardware that is within its warranty for anything the business needs to keep making money.)

Also there has been a lot of consolidation, virtualization and moving things to the cloud going on, meaning that many companies now need less on premises hardware than they needed years ago.

All that adds up to lots of used server hardware being around for people to use at home and try things out.

some of the low end server hardware can be as cheap as high end desktop computer.

Some people simply have enough money to spend on a hobby of theirs to buy new servers.

They will almost never be able to make a profit of them though. Renting servers in the cloud from amazon or Microsoft is so cheap that your homelab will almost never be a cheaper alternative.

It does give you an opportunity to try all sorts of things though.

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