Paid off my homelab with side hosting income

Finally I can post this. My homelab he is paid off. Two years of side hosting income from my little Hostinger reseller account and some custom cPanel setups for local businesses. My VPS it crashed many times, my power bill he went crazy, but now the balance is zero.

I want to be transparent because everyone here he talks about "passive income" but nobody he shows the numbers. So here is my truth:

• Total hardware cost: R$ 18.400 (used Dell rack server, UPS, switch, cabling)
• Total electricity over 24 months: R$ 7.200 (I measured with kill-a-watt, nossa!)
• Hosting income after Hostinger fees: R$ 28.600
• My time: I don't count, caramba, too depressing

Net positive R$ 3.000. Not rich. But my lab he is free now. I will keep the reseller but no more chasing clients at 2am. Proper hobby again. Cheers lads, who else has real numbers?

Docker? Nothing but just process isolation with extra steps þessi homelab of yours it runs on bare metal or you know systemd units directly no containers at home never the virtualization tax is real but the container tax is worse þú ert að keyra cPanel still that is the real cost not the hardware the license the updates the ancient php versions systemd handles my services fine has for years but to be fair R$ 3000 positive is positive respect for the transparency kate will tell you openvz would have been cheaper she is not wrong

Right then, full disclosure from the other side—I'm the Lee in Hostinger, and your account was one of our better behaved ones. Proper monitoring, no spam complaints, actual tickets written in sentences. The margins on your £4/month plans were, well, let's say I'm not buying a yacht.

Your transparency is refreshing. Most resellers claim they're clearing thousands. We see the chargebacks. We see the "my nephew does websites" disasters. Your realistic thread here might do more good than our entire knowledge base.

Annual tradition? I'm in. I'll even sticky a proper profit/loss template if there's interest.

I track all spending, this is important

I am using spreadsheet, I swap b and v sometimes in notes, my friend he laughs, but numbers they are real:

Total spent: 1440€
Total earned from hosting small sites: 1890€
Profit: 450€ for three years, this is not passive, this is, how you say, hobby with benefits

I am thinking to move to Leaseweb because prices are more fast there, but support is, nossa, not so good, caramba, I will see

@CarlosBilby respect for numbers, mano, kkkkk

Virtualization tax matters more than most home operators realize. Your Dell's power draw—what generation? If it's pre-Broadwell, you're paying 40-60W extra idle versus something newer. The virtualization tax on that hardware is compounded by inefficient PSU, old DDR3, the whole platform.

OpenVZ would have let you oversell memory more aggressively, but at kernel compatibility cost. KVM with proper cgroup limits is the honest middle path. Your Hostinger reseller was likely on KVM given their infrastructure.

For comparison: my own lab runs two used mini-PCs, 35W combined, Proxmox with strict cgroup limits. No cPanel license. No container overhead. Annual power under $80. The hardware paid for in fourteen months, not twenty-four.

Your transparency is valuable. The annual tradition should include virtualization stack and power efficiency. Those numbers tell more than gross revenue.