Cost of running a home server?

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Hey!
Anyone know how much it would cost to run a home server electricity wise?
Specs:
800 Watt PSU
AMD Phenom I x4 @ 2.5 Ghz
3GB DDR 2 ram
No GPU/Onboard GPU
Ubuntu Server 12.04.
Anyone have any ideas of how much it would cost?
Im planning on running a game server on it so the average CPU consumption would probably be 56-65% for no less then 58 hours a week I should imagine.
Any ideas?
Thanks!

A few pounds per year, I'd guess, and not outrageous - but you can easily measure the actual power consumption and calculate an accurate figure.
Check out these power monitors: http://www.maplin.co.uk/productsearch?c ... y+Monitors

So it would be very cheap then? No more then 5 pounds a quater?
We are with Southern Electric who I think charge 11p on our tariff.

Make a few "guesstimate" calculations: assume 50w, 100w, 200w and 400w to get some rough cost ideas - but unless you measure it you'll never really know.
It will also vary depending on what the server's doing.

It would be hosting a Gmod server with 26 slots.
So... It usually gets to about 5% with 6 players on. It will end up getting 20 when I promote it a little more. So your looking at like 60% CPU usage. Im also using a laptop HDD so them 2 put together your looking at about 140-190W under heavy load id say.
It should be pretty low powered. I did do some calculations and apparently it would cost 18 pounds a quater... Surely that cant be right... Maybe Im doing it wrong? :/

You won't be able to calculate power consumption, at the wall socket level, from a CPU loading figure - it's not a direct linear equivalent of power consumption. Likewise with the drives - their actual power consumption will vary depending on how they're being used.

Much easier if you just get a power monitor.
You can get genuine, real-world figures for any loading situation you can create on the server.

Ah ok
Aslong as it wont cost me a fortune. It spends half its time empty anyways so the power consumption shouldn't be too high. I have had a look at the electric metre at night and turned everything off and the wheel was so slow I couldn't see it move. So I suppose its not bad.

Some rough "back of envelope" figures to play with:
The power consumption is given in units on your bill and each unit is usually 1kWh, so ignoring any cheaper off-peak figures and taking 11p per unit as constant, running a 1kW heater for an hour will use 1 unit and therefore cost 11p.
So...
A 100w incandescent bulb over the same time will cost 1/10 of that: 1.1p.
Run it for 10 hours and it will cost 11p.

So take 150w and 300w consumption as entirely guessed and constant examples, that would be 1.65p/hour and 3.3p/hour.
24 hours x 30 days per month = 720 hours, giving monthly costs of £11.88 and £23.76 - if run 24/7.

A lowish spec computer that is not too heavily loaded will probably pull around 60W. If you are running 58 hours/week that is about 38p/week. If you are running 24/7 it will be more like £1.11/week or £57/year. Total power consumption does depend on load. If it is heavily loaded the consumption may rise to 100W or more. I'm not too sure how efficient Phenom processors are but being a 4 core I guess it will probably pull a bit more than the machines I tested. It is quite scary how much it can cost to run machines all the time.

I have a server that runs 24/7. Everything on it is highly optimised for low power consumption and I have the total setup including a broadband router down to about 23w. When it is working hard doing a backup with both backup drives spinning the consumption rises to about 35W. I guess that costs me around £25/year. Even though I built it from second hand parts the payback time is probably longer than the machine will last. However the more important aspect for me is that it is virtually silent as it has no fans.

I'd suggest getting a kill-a-watt unit or similar. You can measure your power consumption for certain devices at the wall.

My server, specs below, is in an idle state 99.9+% of the time and sits around ~75w 24/7.
Where I live it costs $0.13 for 1 kWh, so for a years usage:

75w / 1000 (kW) = 0.075 kWh * 24 = 1.8 kWh/day * 365 = 657 kWh/yr * $0.13 = $85.41/yr

AMD Athlon II X2 270u
Asus M5A78L-M LX+
1x4 GB Samsung 30nm
64 GB Samsung 830
7x 1 TB RAID5
Corsair CX430

Wont hosting bandwidth cost you magnitudes more than the electricity?

Around here usage is pretty strictly enforced for the plan you paid for.. so be sure to check 'lest there be bigtime expenses for overloading your internet provider!

I doubt it will cost too much, I have a Dell PowerEdge SC1425, a proper rackmount server, just sits on a shelf in my living room and since getting it my electricity usage is about the same as it was before, the server is rarely under heavy load, plus it's up 24/7 as I use it to host websites from home, not sure how efficient it actually is power wise though I suspect quite efficient given it is a purpose built server designed to be left running 24/7 and, as I mentioned, having little effect on my power usage, this machine has 2 individual Intel Xeon CPU's clocked at 2.8GHz each though most of the time uses just one of them and 6GB RAM and coming nowhere near using all of it or any of the swap on the main hard disk so load levels are pretty low anyway which I suspect helps some with the power use.

Typical optimised home server will draw aprox 30 Watts. Or 0.03Kwh x24x365x 0.23 Euro per Kwh.

Or 60 euro per year

I measured the power consumption of several desktop computers recently and none were as low as I expected. The best is new and draws up to 120 Watts (display on and disk seeking), or as low as 55 Watts (display off and idling). The worst drew 180 Watts idling and 240 in seek with the display on. That is from a best-case 73 euro and worst case 315 euro per year. Replacing the worst offender with a typical laptop (drawing between 25 and 60 watts in use) would pay for itself in less than two years.

In contrast, a purpose-built NAS box which is active all the time draws 12 Watts (16 euro per year).

No doubt a typical desktop can be optimised to save some power, although using suspend and wake-on-LAN is even more effective if you don't have continuous demand. But you do need to measure the real consumption at the outlet with a power meter.

Thats what i was thinking too. There could be additional bandwidth consumption fees: Some ISPs have a IO-quota that you should stay under or it will cost more. And not every ISP allow you to run a server from home (they actively block incomming connections), check with your ISP before you fire it up.

^ Or it simply serves content out over the LAN, not the WAN.