While those prices seem pretty good for first world countries, many of the people in my country don't make more than $1000 per month, so it'd still be a substantial investment.
There's nothing wrong with consumer hardware for homelabs (except for ECC RAM sometimes not being supported), for example, i use Athlon 200GE's for mine because of the 35W TDP and however much RAM i can buy, with some SeaGate HDDs for storage.
That's definitely enough to run some virtualization, though nowadays i mostly use Docker Swarm (while K3S would also run with little issues on that hardware).
Of course, there are also the option of looking at alternatives to expensive cloud vendors: not everyone needs AWS, GCP or Azure, which are better suited for businesses. Some alternatives that come to mind are:
- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
- Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
Personally, i use an even cheaper host, called Time4VPS, which is in Lithuania: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (disclaimer: affiliate link), which i've been using for a few years. Of course, using something like BackupPC https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ to make incremental backups with rsync is also useful in the case of all of these services.
There's nothing wrong with consumer hardware for homelabs (except for ECC RAM sometimes not being supported), for example, i use Athlon 200GE's for mine because of the 35W TDP and however much RAM i can buy, with some SeaGate HDDs for storage.
That's definitely enough to run some virtualization, though nowadays i mostly use Docker Swarm (while K3S would also run with little issues on that hardware).
Of course, there are also the option of looking at alternatives to expensive cloud vendors: not everyone needs AWS, GCP or Azure, which are better suited for businesses. Some alternatives that come to mind are:
- Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
- Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
Personally, i use an even cheaper host, called Time4VPS, which is in Lithuania: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (disclaimer: affiliate link), which i've been using for a few years. Of course, using something like BackupPC https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ to make incremental backups with rsync is also useful in the case of all of these services.