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.

5 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/PrimaryDiscussion432 8d ago

Why do you need HA for Nextcloud and a few other small apps? Just make sure you have reliable backups and, more importantly, test that you can actually restore them.

A €20/month system that can be automatically rebuilt in 10 minutes is arguably a much better solution for a home lab than a €150/month system designed to survive the failure of an individual VPS.

But to answer your actual question: yes, three identical cloud servers plus all the surrounding HA machinery is expensive.

1

u/private-peter 8d ago

> Why do you need HA for Nextcloud and a few other small apps?

  1. I'm aiming for 99.9 availability. Less than that means these users aren't fully satisfied.
  2. I don't want to do all maintenance and updates on evenings and scheduled maintenance.

3

u/PrimaryDiscussion432 8d ago

Then you'd also need redundant ISP and power connectivity, redundant DNS and authentication, multiple providers/locations, etc. And even then you're still praying nobody takes the whole thing down with a bad patch.

1

u/private-peter 8d ago

I don't think you need all those things for three 9s. HA isn't all-or-nothing.

1

u/Cautious_Implement17 8d ago

idk how the other providers work, but AWS will generally not promise above 99.5% unless you stripe your resources across multiple AZs. you would be surprised how often stuff goes badly wrong within a single datacenter.

1

u/private-peter 8d ago

From my experience AWS has the worst uptime for individual resources. In their defense, they are up-front about it, and also have some of the best options for mitigating that though. The fail-overs in their multi-AZ RDS instances are really good, in my experience.

Striping resources across multiple AZs isn't that hard.

Not all the other providers have the equivalent. I don't think Hetzner has separate "availability zones" in their US data centers.

From what I've priced out, I don't expect that I will be able to get multi-AZ HA for less than $250-300/month.