The cloud bill started to look like a mortgage payment. Half the machines sit idle: night, lunch, or an experimental VM I forgot to shut down three weeks ago.
The fix was insultingly simple. A used $300 server and Proxmox VE. Fifteen-plus VMs: databases, staging, VPN, proxy, a CI runner. One metal mule.
About $500 a month. The server paid for itself faster than I found dark mode in the admin.
Proxmox is a free hypervisor with a web UI. Install it on bare metal and you get a home cloud without monthly rent.
In 2024-2025, paying for idle became normal. For a small team, cheap used hardware plus an evening of setup often beats a standing cloud rent.
What you actually get
KVM and LXC. Linux, Windows, BSD. Snapshots, backups, live migration. API, Terraform, Ansible. Need another machine: add a node, form a cluster.
My setup: a used HP ProLiant, 128 GB RAM, SSD for the system, HDD for the array. You can start with a $150 mini-PC: enough for three to five VMs. More important than "powerful" is quiet, reliable, and not eating the budget.
A big box 24/7 is about $25 in power. A mini-PC is about $2. Sometimes "slow and steady" is literally watt-hours.
What to do the first evening
Download the ISO, install, open the web UI. Immediately:
- Turn off the enterprise repo, turn on no-subscription.
- Backups: every night local, once a week off-site.
- Monitoring and alerts. Otherwise a user writes first.
Then the pleasant routine: an Ubuntu or Debian ISO, Create VM, CPU, RAM, disk, guest OS. By night you have a cloud without fine print.
Databases do not face the world. Hide them behind a VPN or a reverse proxy. Save on what you control: cache, snapshots, thin disks. Do not save on backups. Practice restores. Do not believe.
TCO: $300 of metal plus about $120 a month versus $600+ in the cloud. Payoff in a few months. Power, uplink, updates are yours now. UPS, monitoring, a backup that does not live in the same house. Hybrid is fine: stateful at home, elastic in the cloud.
If you have five teams and a petabyte of traffic, go to the cloud. For a small production and your own development this is enough. Spin a VM up, break it, roll back. The bill did not grow.
See also