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I am looking for ways to cut my electricity bills to run a local server. It costs me about 6 EUR per month to run it but I would like to cut it down because I will surely need more capital to upgrade it in the future besides the internet connection cost. Any ideas to cover the bill? Could I rent some space or something like that?

I would like to have some label like "budget-planning", "frugal" or something like that showing my goal to cut costs in running a local server.

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closed as too localized by womble, Ben Pilbrow, SvW, Scott Pack, Iain Jul 30 '11 at 12:53

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Running a physical server that cheaply is actually a very good price. I suspect you've already found the bottom of that particular cost/efficiency curve. The only thing left is to convince someone else to pay the 6 EUR or have it hosted in a house where electricity is cheaper. Other then that, to my knowledge only one thing would be cheaper and that would be to forgo the physical server and go with either a shared server somewhere or a right sized VPS.

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sysadmin1138: yes I have been looking for locations with very low electricity prices for a while. I am always interested to cut costs, any idea how much does it cost to run a full-blown server farm per comp? Why is right sized VPS cheaper to run? I have no idea about VPS. – user10608 Jul 30 '11 at 12:51
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@hhh It might be cheaper. The virtual private server options out there are legion, sifting through them all for the right combination of CPU power & RAM at the right price-point will take no little effort, but if your demands are low enough you could break the 6/month barrier. – sysadmin1138♦ Jul 30 '11 at 12:52
sysadmin1138: where should I start looking for low-cost VPSs? Can I set it up to my server or how does it work? Yes my demands are very low currently. – user10608 Jul 30 '11 at 12:55
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@hhh I wouldn't know, since I don't work in that market. For a quick run-down of how it works, I suggest looking at linode. They don't meet your price-point, but will introduce you to what I'm talking about. There are a LOT more companies that provide this service, so look around once you've got a handle on it. – sysadmin1138♦ Jul 30 '11 at 13:00
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@hhh one of the most important things when it comes to cutting costs is to recognise your own time as a cost. If you decide your time on a project is worth 10 euros per hour (for the sake of a nice easy number) and you spend 20 hours finding a way to reduce your electricity costs by 1 euro a month then how long will it take you to recoup the time spent and would you still think its worth it? – RobM Jul 30 '11 at 13:24
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Any attempts to rent space are going to cost you a lot more than 6 EUR per month. Any attempts to reduce this amount significantly are going to end up costing you a lot more (for instance, you can buy extremely energy-efficient servers, but they'll cost you a lot more than 100 EUR to buy, making the whole thing a bit pointless from an economic standpoint).

Honestly, if 6 EUR a month is enough to push you from profitability to bankruptcy, I think you've got bigger things to worry about.

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