60w is like £120 a year, these costs add up to the point that low spec servers pretty much always cost more in energy than hardware. Of course it also depends on where you live and your energy rates.

You could buy a 20 year old server that is going to use 800w, or you could buy a mini PC that is probably more powerful and uses like 10-20w.

Then again, I used to live somewhere that energy was included in the rent so short of starting a bitcoin farm usage wouldn’t really get noticed too much. In that case it would make sense to just go cheap hardware.

Your energy is clearly a lot cheaper than mine then.

Oh I am not saying specifically get a raspberry pi, personally looking at a bee-link N150 mini PC. It isn’t even that much more expensive than the 16GB raspberry pi and as its x86 I can just run normal debian installs in proxmox.

Power consumption is a massive reason to really not do that. Its cheap for a reason, its takes a shitload of power to be shit and you will pay more in energy than you save in hardware unless its only powered on for short periods of time - a server typically isn’t.

This is actually something that applies to cheap products too. Was in Asda a little while ago and saw 2 LED bulbs with the same lumen rating. Cheaper one used 3w more and you only saved £1. Running it for 8 hours a day for a year would cost double that saving in electricity. For a server you are looking at almost £2 per watt each year. Does that ewaste look so good to you now?

Some things are absolutely worth getting second hand, but you really should be careful considering the power cost as well.

Quick edit: If you don’t need it running 24/7, consider something like AWS too. I love selfhosting but if its not running much it might be cheaper to not bother buying hardware.

Podcasts have managed on platforms that don’t even report viewer counts. Apparently they didn’t like it when it was updated so that they did.

An obvious option though is discount codes or affiliate links.

View numbers. They don’t care where people are viewing it. Which is why you can then distribute it to as many platforms as you like.

I will self host content that I pirate from youtube

Sponsorships seem to be getting increasingly common and IIRC are way more profitable than youtube ads. Also typically less annoying to the end user? Not sure, I sponsorblock them. At the very least you can choose where they go.

I have yet to need Windows for anything and I switched when my WinXP machine decided booting was too difficult.