I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.
Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?
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And ruin my uptime stats? Are you mad?!?!
Among the many things I run are my own email servers so, yeah gotta be up all the time. And yes I have a UPS behind every electronic device in my house except the TV because if that dies I get to buy a new one.
I’ve probably spent upwards of $2000 on UPSes and replacement batteries over the last 20 years, but if it saved even one of my servers from taking a hit it was worth it. Servers are expensive and my time is valuable to me.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/705/
There’s a poweroff?!
Im pretty sure OP is just yanking our chain.
I leave my servers running 24/7, thats the point of a server. Also my home automation would be a little pointless if its off.
I did have a UPS, but it died and I have got round to replacing it.
Its all horses for courses, if your homelab is a playground to test things out then turning it off when not is use is fine. But some have live services that you may want at a moments notice and there for having it up all the time is better.
My home server does all my network related stuff (including DNS and DHCP) turning it off would be a very bad idea due to this.
I don’t have a UPS, but it is relatively high on my list.
It all depends if you actually nerd those services 24/7
I dont need DHCP or DNS from 1am to 6am for example
“Do I need them? No, but I nerd them, so they stay up!”
A most relevant typo 👍
need them
LOL I do nerd em all as well
Entirely depends on the usecase. If it’s a NAS and you only watch a few movies in the evening: Turn it off.
I bult a fairly power-efficient server. Consumes less than 20W and spins down the harddisks if not in use.
I can’t turn it off because none of the lightbulbs in the house would turn on anymore, my website would go down, my Fediverse instance wouldn’t pull any posts from American people who are awake during parts of the night. My emails and chat messages wouldn’t get delivered.
I don’t have a UPS. Also depends on the circumstances. I use ext4 as a filesystem which is kind of robust enough to handle power outages. And they’re rare where I live. A UPS would draw additional power and cost money. It’s not worth it for me at home.
You can do whatever you want. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “wrong”. A big part of homelabbing is to try stuff. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, you learned something, and that was the point.
For me, I don’t see a UPS as essential. It’s generally a good idea, but not strictly essential. My servers are on 24/7, because I have services that do things overnight for me. I also know that some people access my lab when I’m not awake, so I just leave it on so it can be ready for anything at any time. It poses some unique challenges sometimes when running stuff that’s basically 24/7/365.
Be safe, have fun, learn stuff.
No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now there’s nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.
But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol
We power off servers in the enterprise all the time and on schedules 😂. Its called saving money.
Uh, in your “enterprise” maybe lol.
In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night… If you’re not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you’re doing it wrong.
