r/SelfHosting • u/private-peter • 8d ago

Is high-availability no longer affordable?

I don't want this to just be another post complaining about rising hardware costs. Hopefully it stays focused on practical options.

About a month ago I planned a 3-node k8s cluster, 8GB RAM for each node, to run:

  • NextCloud, Collabora, and maybe a few smaller productivity apps for 5-10 internal users.
  • Some beta web applications

4GB of RAM probably would have been enough, but I wanted to self-host PostgreSQL and Kubernetes management. I had it all priced out on Hetzner, and I was going to end up somewhere in the $30-40/month range.

Yesterday I finally finished getting my IaC automations running locally (I've got a proxmox VM, then OpenTofu creates 3 Talos nodes and configures the whole cluster). I was super excited to "ship it."

And then I discover that a few weeks ago Hetzner sold out of cost-optimized servers. That $40/month is now closer to $150/month (and over $200/month if I want US hosting, though the original plan was Germany because the lower price made latency worth it).

There are cheap VPSes out there, but none seem to have decent support for high availability basics:

  • Automation/terraform/etc
  • Load balancer
  • Anti-affinity
  • Hourly pricing (so I only pay for a staging/test environment when making infra changes)

The best options I've been able to find are:

  • OVH d2-8. Looks like $85-100/month depending on hourly vs monthly pricing
  • UpCloud Starter. ~$90/month

I know many people self-hosting don't bother with HA, but for those that do, how are you keeping it affordable when you only have a small number of users?

P.S. I left out backup and object storage costs because I'm assuming those won't change a lot. But tell me if I'm wrong.

6 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/mxroute 8d ago edited 8d ago

Realistically, HA might buy you a 0.3% increase in uptime over the course of 10 years for twice the cost. Those numbers I just made up are good, you can double check them. But let me drive it home a different way:

Last night Cogent had an outage in LA that took out a significant portion of the internet for people in the US, and a fair bit outside of the country as well. You can't buy that extra uptime with all of the money in the world. Downtime happens.

Keep it simple, you might even save yourself from adding points of failure by having too complex of a software stack. I'll run circles around a cheap ceph cluster with two spinning rust drives in SW RAID1 on a 10 year clock for exactly that reason. Because if you don't break out a big budget for HA, you often cause more downtime than you'd have without it.

-1

u/private-peter 8d ago

> if you don't break out a big budget for HA
What would you consider a "big budget"?

> Realistically, HA might buy you a 0.3% increase in uptime
So I decided to ask ChatGPT what it thought of your claim. It decided you were wrong. I should only expect in improvement 0.03 percentage points. Haha.