My least favourite (and only) method for me to cut costs is reduce my energy consumption.

I already have a super cheap setup (used Mini-PC for 50 bucks, old SSDs I had lying around, etc.), so reducing the hardware costs more isn't possible.

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But, without tweaks, this setup would eat 15W (idle) and 25W (under load) electricity. At least, thats the case atm.

I just started selfhosting to be fair, and I didn't have time to throttle the server. I use it mainly as NAS, so speed isn't as important in this case as for other services like webapps, where reactivity is needed.

The CPU isn't too bad, so, even when reducing the performance to 50%, it should still work.

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Also, I will try to change the active cooling fan to a passive heat sink, that might reduce the bill further.

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What mainly eats resources like crazy is my Nextcloud AIO. I try to follow the UNIX-principle as good as I can, and NC doesn't follow it well, at least for my use case.

I only need a file server, and NC is pretty "bloated" with talk, calender, and so on. So I disabled all of that.

But, I'm not capable enough to set up an Online-FTP-Server and secure it enough without ever working in that environment. NC AIO provides a lot of comfort and "just works". So, I'm fine with that.

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Here in Germany, especially thanks to the energy crisis, electricity is absurdly expensive, and even reducing the TDP by a few % will save me much money over a year.

So, I try to reduce the load and increase efficiency wherever I can.

Still, even now, with an increased energy consumption + paid domain, it's still cheaper than using OneDrive or something like that, even when ignoring storage size.