I believe this is a slightly controversial topic, at least from what I have gathered so far. Some say its best to leave the server on to spare the life time of the spinning rust. Other seem to prefer to save power and boot the server off each night. So wanted to chip in and hear what folks here do and why do what you do.

Bonus question; Do you guys have a UPS? Is it a must have for a homelab, or does it just depend on the usecase?

  • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    No one should be powering off their servers. Thats really not the way to go about anything. Now there’s nothing stopping you from doing that either if you want to and it makes you happy or your life easier.

    But if you want a simple answer to a simple question, no, nobody sane is doing that lol

    • BritishJ@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      We power off servers in the enterprise all the time and on schedules 😂. Its called saving money.

        • BritishJ@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          In pretty much any enterprise using the public cloud. Everything is auto scaling, so shutdowns when not needed. Dev environments shutdown over night… If you’re not shutting down and scaling in the public cloud, you’re doing it wrong.

            • BritishJ@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Is it shutting down servers… Yes. it just does it based on parameters and thresholds.

              Then you get things like VDI servers and jump boxes that only need to be on between certain hours, so get shutdown outside them hours.

                • BritishJ@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  But it is. They’re stopped and deallocated. They start up when demanded. And shutdown when below a threshold or a certain schedule.

                  • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    I’m starting to understand why British admins are paid so much less than their American counterparts.

              • WordBox@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Right you don’t shut them down, you scale them down. My server also uses less power off peak demand.

                • BritishJ@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  No we shut them down. They get deallocated the same way as shutting down a virtual server does. They’re not containers, the scaling part just turns them on and off based on workload or schedule

              • Butt Pirate@reddthat.com
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                4 months ago

                Most of us don’t have clusters so shutting down the server means taking the server and all associated services completely offline.

                Do you take your product completely offline for 8 hours every single day?

          • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I see where your head is at here, but it sounds like you’re focusing on containerized items. A lot of people are going to look at you real weird if you think of scaling down a container as equivalent to shutting down a server. We can all see where your mind is going and there is logic there, but it’s more akin to closing chrome when you’re not using it than it is to shutting down the computer running chrome.

            • brygphilomena@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Even physical hardware, if your paying power you can have clusters of physical hardware power up and down based on usage. There is no point in having 10 physical hosts running when the workload for n+1 means 3 servers overnight. With bnc, ipmi, ilo, idrac it will power them up as needed.