Cost-cutting tips?

nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 62 points –

What are your favourite, or least favourite but necessary, cost-cutting methods?

I feel I am spending too many resources on unnecessary stuff.

Edit: I feel the need to reduce both – the resources, to host multiple things on one system, and cost, to buy/pay for multiple systems. Currently, I have 2 ARM VPSes and 1 old MacBook Air as a home server.

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cron instead of a calendar

What do you mean by that?

Do you use crontab to save events?

Basically, yes. You can configure most cron programs to mail task output to you (it's usually done by setting the MAILTO variable in the crontab, provided sendmail is available on your system).

I use that to do things like:

0 9 11 10 * echo 'lunch with John Doe at 12:20'

It sends me a mail, and I can see the upcoming events with crontab -l. If it's not a recurring event, I then delete the rule.

And to expand further on simplicity, one can avoid using email and send messages over ntfy with just a POST curl call.

I like your setup!

Damn, I'm doing *nixes for nearly 30 years. But never went to that level of minimalism. Nice trick.