Colo costs are just insane compared to consumer prices.
At home: 12 or 42 €/month (details¹), depending on whether I want gigabit upload or not. Advantages:
- fast LAN speeds,
- don't need to go anywhere to do hardware maintenance/replacement/additions,
- low cost,
- partially solar powered if you have solar panels,
- don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like),
- likely you have more space available, and you get to share that gigabit uplink if you pay for it for your server.
Colocation: €128 / month (120 base price, 8 electricity in germany; if you want to fly to Finland for accessing your hardware, then electricity is half the price). Advantages:
- redundant power supply,
- maybe noise if you don't have a separate room for this stuff,
- you can do this also if your home has poor internet.
¹ I pay €50/month for my internet connection regardless (I didn't buy a bigger bundle for the server), the server uses ~35W average which makes ~26 kWh/month which makes ~9 €/month. Though, I'd pay the base connection fee for electricity anyway so the added cost is even a bit lower. Rent is about €6 per m², but I have my stuff in between storage (above and below) so the column above those 1.5 m² is basically cut in three, coming out to about 3 €/month added cost. The added cost of hosting a server at home is about 12 euros per month. If I wanted to upgrade to gigabit symmetric internet, that would be an added 30 €/month (total 42 €/month). At 35W it doesn't make much of a difference for cooling, but there is no AC installed in my home anyway.
At home: 12 or 42 €/month (details¹), depending on whether I want gigabit upload or not. Advantages:
- fast LAN speeds,
- don't need to go anywhere to do hardware maintenance/replacement/additions,
- low cost,
- partially solar powered if you have solar panels,
- don't need to make things fit in a rack (can be a raspberry pi, an old laptop, or whatever you like),
- likely you have more space available, and you get to share that gigabit uplink if you pay for it for your server.
Colocation: €128 / month (120 base price, 8 electricity in germany; if you want to fly to Finland for accessing your hardware, then electricity is half the price). Advantages:
- redundant power supply,
- maybe noise if you don't have a separate room for this stuff,
- you can do this also if your home has poor internet.
¹ I pay €50/month for my internet connection regardless (I didn't buy a bigger bundle for the server), the server uses ~35W average which makes ~26 kWh/month which makes ~9 €/month. Though, I'd pay the base connection fee for electricity anyway so the added cost is even a bit lower. Rent is about €6 per m², but I have my stuff in between storage (above and below) so the column above those 1.5 m² is basically cut in three, coming out to about 3 €/month added cost. The added cost of hosting a server at home is about 12 euros per month. If I wanted to upgrade to gigabit symmetric internet, that would be an added 30 €/month (total 42 €/month). At 35W it doesn't make much of a difference for cooling, but there is no AC installed in my home anyway.