The 44bits blog has gone through three server migrations in the past three years. Since no new posts have been published since 2022, you might think the server could just run without issue, but merely keeping it up costs money.

We’ve summarized the history of our server migrations.

Phase 1: Start

This was when Nacyot was managing the server. Server costs were paid personally on AWS and elsewhere. To publish an article, we had to send a Markdown file to Nacyot.

Phase 2: Maximalist

AWS EKS(Kubernetes provided by AWS) was the basis of our infrastructure. Using EKS on AWS made the costs significant. I don’t remember exactly, but it was over about 300,000 KRW per month. It was also around the time Daangn Market was adopting EKS, so we wanted to try running it in advance, and since Daangn Market was sponsoring the server costs, although it wasn’t cheap, we thought the sponsorship mention at the bottom of the site and such would have some effect.

However, with no new posts for over two years and high server costs, we decided to cut expenses.

Phase 3: Cost reduction

Since 44bits members work a lot with AWS, the next setup naturally also ran on AWS.Digital Ocean similar to AWS Lightsail allowed us to lower server costs compared to EKS. However, we still used a DB instance, and Lightsail wasn’t exactly cheap either. Monthly server costs were around 150,000 KRW.

Phase 4: On-premises

Concerns about server costs existed not only for 44bits but also for personal servers. Even Lightsail or Digital Ocean felt burdensome for running a single personal blog, and if we chose cheaper options, the memory and CPU resources were barely enough for one service, so trying to run other personal projects alongside would drive up server costs.

What we learned about then was SmileServe, an on-premises server hosting provider. Green 16T BMv1 servercost 59,000 KRW per month and, with 32 GB of memory, had specs suitable for running multiple services on a single machine.

However, if we misconfigured something and the server went down, we had to request a remote reboot (they do it quickly), and network fees were billed separately. Overseas traffic was more expensive, so for 44bits, which has a lot of overseas traffic, the network cost was a burden. We concluded the high overseas traffic was because most RSS services are located abroad.

Phase 5: Home server

Once we experienced the generous memory and performance per price of on-premises, cloud services no longer appealed. But colocating at an IDC was expensive, and while we were debating, Nacyot brought a mini PC he had been using at home to the 44bits studio, saying it could serve as a server. It was about the size of a Mac mini, had almost no fan noise, used little power, and the network environment was more stable than expected. Above all, the mini PC price of around 300,000 KRW was attractive.

Excluding internet costs, one month of Phase 2 AWS EKS fees would run the home server for several years, and about six months of on-premises SmileServe fees equaled the cost of buying a mini PC.

That’s how we discovered the potential of a mini PC as a home server, and the 44bits server is now running on a home server built with mini PCs.

Summary

In a few upcoming posts, we plan to explain, step by step, how to run a home server with a mini PC at low cost at home or in the office.