From AWS to DIY: Building a Cost-Effective 💸 Home Server with Ubuntu Server, Docker, Portainer & Nginx on a High-Performance Mini PC! 🚀
As a software engineer, I’ve relied on AWS for cloud computing for some time, but the rising costs finally pushed me to rethink things 💸. During Black Friday, I jumped on a deal I couldn’t resist 🎉 and built a home setup around a GMKtec mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS, paired with 2 x 48GB of DDR5 5600MHz Crucial RAM and two 4TB Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs. The whole setup cost me €1,100 (about $1,200 USD) and runs at only 35W ⚡—that’s roughly €4.30 ($4.60 USD) a month in electricity here in France 🇫🇷. Compare that to the $517 per month I’d pay to run an AWS EC2 m8g.4xlarge instance. Now, I’ve got 16 CPUs (8 cores, 16 threads) 💻, 96GB of speedy RAM ⚙️, and 8TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage 💾 for demanding workloads. It’s a massive money-saver 💰 and the perfect base for a home lab running Ubuntu Server 🐧. Tools like Portainer make container management easy 🛠️, and Nginx Proxy Manager simplifies reverse proxy configurations 🔄. If cloud costs are draining your budget, making the switch is well worth it 🚀!