Mega yachts have to be started regularly to keep the engine running smoothly. So even if you aren't going anywhere, you still have to spend thousands in gas each few days just so it performs well when you do actually use it.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Am I the only one who sees this as an endorsement for self hosting?
I would love to see the numbers for 5 people watching an already downloaded movie off a hard drive.
If the house has solar panels and is net zero, it would make the emissions 0 right?
Edit: while I do agree about economies of scale, what I am doubting is streaming every single time vs playing locally or steaming in a local network. Local play is always more efficient
self hosting is wildly less efficient… one of the biggest costs in data centres is electricity, and one of the biggest constraints is electrical infrastructure… you have pretty intense power budgets in data centres and DC equipment is pretty well optimised to be efficient
meanwhile a home server doesn’t likely use server hardware (server hardware is far more efficient), is probably about 5-10y or more out of date, and isn’t likely particularly dense: a single 1500w server can probably service ~20 people in a DC… meanwhile an 800w home server could probably handle ~5 people
add the fact that netflix pre-transcodes their vids in many different qualities and formats, whilst home streaming - unless streaming original quality - mostly re-transcodes which is a very energy-hungry process
heck even just the hard drives: if everyone ran their own servers and stored their content that’s thousands if not hundreds of thousands more copies of the data, and all that data is probably on spinning disks
My home server used 5w at idle and 9w while streaming. Add another 10w for the hard drive.
According to your example, using Netflix a single user would uses 75w.
That doesn’t include the internet cost which I bet is significant as well.
There is a reason paying for Netflix is like $20 a month and internet cost is like $50-100 whereas it costs close to $1/month of electricity for self hosting and no internet cost during usage.
an n150 mini pc - largely considered a very efficient package for home servers - consumes ~15w max without the gpu, and ~9w idle
a raspberry pi consumes 3-4w idle
none of that is supporting more than a couple of people streaming 4k like we’re talking about in the case of netflix
and a single hard drive isn’t even close to what we’re talking about… you’re looking at ~30w at least for the disks alone
as for internet cost, it’s likely tiny… my 24 port gigabit switch from 15 years ago sips < 6w… i can only imagine that’s pretty inefficient compared to today’s standards (and 24 port is pretty tiny for a DC, and port power consumption doesn’t scale linearly)
data centres are just straight up way more efficient per unit of processing than your home anything; it pretty much doesn’t matter how efficient your home gear is, or what the workload is unless you switch it off most of the time - which doesn’t happen in a DC
Idk where your getting your numbers from.
Here is an article that talks about HDD read power usage being less than 10w:
https://www.solved.scality.com/high-density-power-consumption-hdd-vs-qlc-flash/
Even with 30w, it’s still lower than the 75w you mentioned.
Also, that hard drive can serve multiple purposes whereas Netflix is only for steaming movies and tv shows (not music, so you got to add Spotify usage to be fully fair).
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Aarrrr, that's why we do the work ourselves!