When my server was a laptop it was on 24/7. When my server was a desktop I had a cron job to turn it off at 2AM. Now that it’s a specialized hardware it’s on 24/7.
Being constantly on is very convenient, but if your services start quickly it’s not the end of the world to have to turn the machine on for them.
Additionally, night time is the time of creating backups. A second server pushes its backup also at night too. Potentially long running tasks like database migration I do at night. Lastly, when my server starts up it needs almost an hour until it truly reaches idle (potentially because it has to keep millions of files in sync with syncthing, I have to investigate). So my servers are more busy at night than at day
I have a small 6U rack in my hallway which is where all the server stuff sits. There are 1U UPS units, but I haven’t had the need for it yet. However after replacing motherboard on this current machine I forgot to turn on option for auto start after power failure. My servers are mostly for collecting data regarding temperature, humidity and other metrics around the house, glass house and other parts. Same machine also collects surveillance data from cameras around the property which detect human and animal shapes.
So since machine rarely does long term calculations or data processing it’s okay that it doesn’t have UPS, since no data would be coming anyway without power.
I personally only turn it off when someone’s visiting over night and the noise disturbs them, otherwise I just leave it on nonstop. Mainly because it would annoy me to try to open whatever and find out I have to turn on the server first. I don’t have a UPS and never even thought about getting one (for the server, I’m thinking of getting one for my 3D printer).
I power off my main server during the night cuz it’s too loud, but I have a secondary one (an old mini-pc) to handle sh!t like wireguard, PiHole and DNS
Everything runs 24/7, but now I am thinking about theoretical power saving modes. Besides any built in power saving whatever (a little clueless), you could always throttle the CPU more. Not sure if it would be worth it without testing with a power meter.
UPS depends on usecase and on the stability of your electrical supply (which varies greatly from place to place). I just leave everything running and have it configured to restart automatically on power restore (if it fails, which it rarely does).
Mine turns off at 2 or if noone has been watching for 10 minutes after 2am and turns on at 5:45. Nobody ever uses it during that time. It’s pointless to keep it running. Additional bonus is that it auto updates all containers each morning. Yes, I sometimes wake up at 4 or 5 and it would be cool if it were running but it shows that you do not NEED it.
For a while I had a low-power server for my personal things that stayed on all the time, and a more powerful computer that hosted a minecraft server. As the player count dwindled, I decided to make the minecraft server automatically shut down at midnight, and wake up at 8 in the morning using rtcwake. And eventually I disabled the rtcwake thing entirely, and made the smaller server run a webui that could wake up the minecraft server using wake-on-lan. So if anyone wanted to play, they would first have to remotely turn on the server through a web page. This was all password-protected ofcourse.
Also, no, I don’t use a UPS. I’ve never seen anyone use a UPS in the country where I live, and I don’t think I’ve experienced a power outtage in like 4 years. Whether or not you need a UPS seems to be largely dependent on where you live.
I let my production systems (1x NAS/1x Proxmox Host) on 24/7 and shut down test systems or my onside backup. I do it mainly to save some power and also noise, because all servers are in my office room. I would prefere some low power/noise machines that can keep running 24/7 and if you really need some horse power because you would want to test something or play around, you can power it on and shut down whenever you want.
But I dont use any UPS, because the power grid is very stable where I live but I have snapshots every hour or so. I can live with an hour of data loss if shit hits the fan.
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