36 Months


Long before I was employed as a Linux Sysadmin it was my hobby. I’ve been employed as a Network Engineer, a Linux Sysadmin or a combination of the two (and a few other things) over the years. I’ve shared the pain of being on-call and spent more hours in data centres than I’d like to admit.

My focus at work has gradually shifted in the last four years and I am less hands-on with networks and servers day to day. As someone with this particular hobby tends to, I’ve always had a number of servers at home and two years ago when my partner and I bought a house, we agreed that the server rack could live in the garage so it now has a real home, with noise isolation and appropriate power feeds.

I’ve personally spent a significant amount of money with various hosting and cloud providers – some of them I quite like and some of them I’m less fond of. For myself I’ve always run a particular set of systems, owned a number of domains and have cycled between self hosting or making everything someone elses problem when I’m less enthused.

Every so often I will look at what I have been spending each month and try to cull things I don’t really use or that I’ve forgotten about. There have been times where I have forgetten that I’m near the end of a credit or something has happened and led to quite signifcant bills.

Screenshot of an AWS invoice with a total of NZ$1,211.53
Part of an AWS invoice with a total of NZ$1,211.53

A few weeks ago while approaching the end of another credit (worth about NZ$450/month) I was looking at my costs and discovered that for NZ$31.71 more than I was already paying (including home internet, cloud providers and other hosting costs) that I could upgrade my home fibre connection to be “business grade” and get a /28 of IPv4 space on top of the existing static IPv4 address and IPv6 space.

During our barely two years here we haven’t had any internet outages (that weren’t self-inflicted) and have only had a few power cuts, almost all of which the UPS(s) survived. Because of the pandemic we both mostly work from home so having a better SLA on the internet connection (which my employer partially pays for) is welcome.

Given the impending financial benefit of roughly NZ$420 each month (which I’m pretty sure would have gotten me in trouble) we agreed to try upgrading and self-hosting almost all the things currently costing money. Our new business internet went live yesterday afternoon and to get the best pricing I signed up for 36 months.

I know that I’m privileged to be able to afford this hobby, to have a house to do it in, a supportive partner, relatively reliable power and internet infrastructure, to have the time and knowledge to at least half-ass it. I also know that this isn’t the right move for everyone, but now that I’m effectively contractually obligated to do it, I thought it might be nice to share the ‘fun’ with others and to allow some of you to live vicariously through me.

I have one power feed, a UPS and no generator. I don’t have multiple internet connections. I’m not doing BGP myself. I live in a place with earthquakes. The only thing stopping someone from ruining my fun is a cheap padlock and a few cameras.

So let’s see how this goes.


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