[shishcat]

I'm a 16 year old with a small homelab too :)

I used to have all of my services on cloud but since I got a 1G/1G home network and I found businesses decommissioning hardware and deals on local charity shops which source hardware from the landfill and give profits to charity missions, I decided to give it a go and try administering my own phisical servers. Currently running proxmox on 2 machines with one NAS and 14 spinning disks, with some Minecraft servers, personal programming projects, vulnerability scanners, telegram bots, VPSes for friends, android and MacOS building VMs, storage, some ML school projects with the recently added 1050ti, and hosting the infrastructure for my school CTF competition.

(Italy btw)

[martopix]

I'm also an Italian who taught himself how to code at 16 (I'm now 34), although not even remotely at your level. Then I studied physics, did a PhD, a postdoc about neural networks, etc., but I felt that what mattered to me the most was to inspire young people like the one I was, and I decided to come back to Italy and become a high school teacher starting this year. I'm also organizing an extracurricular python course in my school. If you're not based far from Milan and are interested in talking to my students, we could consider that! Good luck with everything.

[daniel-s]

This is the really cool thing about the internet. When otherwise would these 2 16 year olds have found each other?

They would otherwise have had to go to the same high school.

[comprev]

Your parents are probably footing a large electricity bill for this running hardware unless there is a revenue stream for your services? Either way, hats off to your folks for supporting your interest.

[shishcat]

I know, my smart plug reports around 60€ a month of costs. Most of it comes from the massive amount of hard drives, I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects. Anyway, I couldn't find rentable dedicated servers with this much storage for less than 50€ a month, the upfront costs of new, energy efficient and powerful hardware is too much, and I truly enjoy running these servers myself.

About the noise, my room has a small mechanical room and that's where the servers are located, the noise can't be heard from the rest of the room.

[mikeruiz]

You’re not wrong, but as a parent I would be very pleased to pay that bill. Best bargain in education I could ask for.

[JKCalhoun]

You could be right — but it's hard to resist the cheap hardware you can find on eBay. I see numerous Hyve Zeus 1U servers on eBay right now for a couple hundred bucks — just add an SSD.

[varun_ch]

That is so cool! I've also been thinking of adding an old graphics card somewhere to support some ML stuff too - I just have to figure out how :)

[midasuni]

Who pays the electric bill? Sounds like it’s in the 50-100USD a month range for those two servers.

[nunesvn]

I'm father of a 10 years old kid. If he wants to run a server at 16, I will give him the electricity bills, a 20U rack, a cisco switch and a bunch of cables. Congratulations to the OP and their family.

[lnxg33k1]

He’s a 16 years old doing a very productive activity, I’d expect the parents to happily pay for it, I’d argue that if someone’s son is interested in learn ing and the energy bill is obstacle to wait before to make kids, parents should feel an obligation to fuel their kids passions

[shishcat]

60€ a month (tplink smart plug, calculated on the cost per kwh and other taxes). I try to pay most of it myself with money from side projects

[rasse]

It's quite normal for parents to pay for their children's hobbies.

[rpigab]

Mine is in the 50-100EUR range per year, powered on all the time. Dell Poweredge T320 with Xeon-2428L and an SSD.

[arnavpraneet]

>businesses decommissioning hardware been looking for this for years but never found them in my country (India). Been a 16 year old with a homelab once, now older but no business hardware yet

[marcocastignoli]

Grande!