When Cloud Became Pricier Than Metal
At some point the cloud bill started to look like a mortgage payment. Half the machines idle — night, lunch, or I forgot to shut down an experimental VM three weeks ago. Familiar?
The fix was embarrassingly simple: a used $300 server + Proxmox VE. Result — 15+ VMs for databases, staging, experiments, VPN, proxy, CI runner — all on a trusty metal mule.
Savings: about $500/month. The server paid for itself faster than it took me to find the dark mode in the admin.
TL;DR: Proxmox is a free hypervisor with a friendly web UI. Install on bare metal and get a controllable “home cloud” without monthly rent pain.
Context of the Era
2024–2025 — cloud bills ballooned; “paying for idle” became normal. For devs and small teams, homelab often wins on TCO: cheap used hardware + setup time vs constant cloud rent. Control and experiment speed go up.
What You Actually Get
- KVM VMs and LXC containers — run Linux, Windows, BSD.
- Snapshots, backups, live migration — experiment without fear.
- API and Terraform/Ansible — automation for order lovers.
- Home‑style scale: need more — add a node, form a cluster.
Hardware without Fanaticism
My setup: used HP ProLiant, 128 GB RAM, SSD for system, HDD array for data. You can start with a $150 mini‑PC — enough for 3–5 VMs. More important than “powerful” is “quiet, reliable, and doesn’t eat the budget.”
Watch power draw. A big box 24/7 ≈ $25/month. A mini‑PC ≈ $2/month. Sometimes “slow and steady” literally means watt‑hours.
Adult‑Grade Deployment without Wall of Text
Download ISO, install, open the web UI — done. Do this immediately:
- Disable enterprise repo, enable no‑subscription.
- Set up backups: nightly local, weekly off‑site.
- Wire monitoring and alerts (otherwise users will tell you first).
Then the fun: upload Ubuntu/Debian/Rocky ISO, “Create VM,” allocate CPU/RAM/disk, install the guest OS. By evening you’ve got your own “cloud” without the fine print.
Keep in Mind
- Don’t expose databases. Hide behind VPN/reverse proxy.
- Save where you control: caching, snapshots, thin disks.
- Don’t save on backups. Practice restores — don’t “believe.”
Business Insights
- TCO: $300 server + ~$120/month ops vs $600+/month in cloud → payoff in a few months.
- Risk and responsibility: power, internet, updates — now yours. Mitigate with UPS, monitoring, off‑site backups.
- Hybrid is fine: keep stateful at home, burst elastic loads to cloud.
Conclusion
Proxmox is a great starting point if you’re tired of paying for air and want control. Not for everyone (if you have five teams and petabytes — go cloud), but for small prod and dev — just what the doctor ordered.
The best part: I now experiment without checking the wallet. Spin VM up, break, rollback — and no “why did the bill spike again?”
See also
- Self‑host Supabase — how I moved prod to my server
