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Hetzner froze my account because I owed them 0.02 EURO's. It was not possible to pay it with a VISA credit or VISA debit, nor Amex card. They required me to wire transfer the money. However my bank does not allow the wiring of a 0.02 EURO amount, as the amount is too low.

Out of pure spite I built my own data center.




Did you try to send them 20€ and request refund of excessive amount?


A customer shouldn't be the one going through such hops in order to "satisfy" a provider who can't bother to accept a widely used mean of payment


Sure. In theory. In real world being a customer often means adapting your expectations and finding workarounds to get what you need. If this solution could have worked, building your own data center would seem rather extreme and unpractical.


Being a customer also means making responsible choices in what companies you do business with.


How did you build your own data center? Is it in your house, or renting a place somewhere? How much did it cost?

I would be curious about any details you can share.


I self host on an NAS at home with a free Cloudfront CDN on top; it's really easy to do and for simple websites (including dynamic ones backed by an sqlite db) that don't receive excessive traffic, it works well and is almost free (since the NAS would be on in any case).

Of course it wouldn't work for all cases but I find it beats having a vps somewhere that can be taken down for no reason at all.


This is like saying "I got kicked off a plane so I bought a Civic and bolted a wing on the back". Cloud front is doing all the heavy lifting and you're not really getting data center level reliability.


Does a Civic fly when it has a wing bolted on it? Coz my setup serves pages alright.


Sure, but that is not what people will read when you say "I built my own data center".

"I setup my own server" would be a lot less misleading.


I never said I built my own data center; I think you have me confused with the OP.


Os: Proxmox

Hardware: 4x Old decommed 19" dells on Ebay with plenty of DDR4 memory, HP Proliant G10+ are also good

Ups Eaton Pro

Gigabit Fiber Internet, which is more than enough. 10-50mbit can suffice for compute nodes too.

Bought ssds and m2 storage plus some spinning ols rust drives

Temp and humidity monitoring

Google Nest Protect smoke detector

TP link 16amp smart plugs on all, to have a control plane to turn it all off remotely

Workloads:

Most are LXC

Some Docker

KVM virtual machines

Zero trust: Some Cloudflare

Tailscale

Proxmox backup server to back it all up, lots of retention

Monitoring:

Deployed remote uptime monitoring on fly.io

Read and experiment a lot Hang out on /r/homelab /r/homedatacenter and /r/selfhosted for learning, community and inspiration


I have space in my house, using up half a shed I have 1 gbit fiber




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