– “Yes he isâ€
My old blog server was sucking out roughly 700 Watts/Hour. By buying a new, modern, cheap PC, I’ve reduced the cost of hosting my own blog to 1/10th of what I was paying!
How much was the old server costing me?
700 watts on idle setting means 0.7 kWh, 24 hours a day, 365 days a 
year = ~6100 Kwh per year! This was an age-old Compaq Proliant Server with two power supplies and a series of cooling fans – not only did it pollute my power bill, it also made a serious amount of noise!
Given today’s power prices, that means roughly 3,000 NOK ( 368 EUR / 511 USD) per year just for having my blog available 24/7! Something had to be done, and fast!
Options
I started to look for a replacement by checking out some servers, but most of these use around 200W of power, and were fairly expensive compared to desktop PC’s (I wanted at least a dual core and 2GB RAM)
I looked into a few Windows Home Servers, but frankly, I need IIS7, and dont want to limit myself to what I can do on that platform. It is a point, however, that Home Server CAN host WordPress, and HP MediaSmart is rumored to use around 80W/hour, which is not bad at all!
Cheap desktop PC to the rescue
I landed on a cheap-ish Packard Bell iMedia PC (image below) that looked like a match for the job. Priced at roughly the same as a year worth of server power, I got a dual-core AMD processor with 3GB of ram and some 300GB of drive space. plenty for hosting IIS7 and WordPress on MySql, and no restrictions in case I want to deploy an ASP.NET application or two.
Once at home, I hooked it up to my watt meter and low and behold, the darned thing does not use more than 50W on balanced setting (around 62W on high performance setting)
50W is a number I can live with 24/7!! I’ve got lightbulbs that use more than that! New cost per year (in power):
238 NOK ( 29 EUR / 40 USD)
That is less than the monthly fee for using one of the cheaper web-hotels out there!
Conclusion
Investing roughly a year’s worth of electrical power to my old web-server, I was able to cut the power consumption of my blog to 1/10th. Since I don’t have that much traffic, the hardware is more than able to respond to my needs, and I got rid of that old, noisy huge box that was doing nothing but costing me money. Less electricity spent = more frogs to kiss somewhere…
You’re actually reading this on the new hardware right now!
