Mojang recently announced the Minecraft Realms service. It allows people to run their own Minecraft servers for $15/month.
I thought this was a great deal, and I was surprised when a sizable number of people complained about the cost over the Internet. They thought $15/month was an outrageous price!
I don’t understand why they would think that. Perhaps they don’t look at their electricity bills?
In the United States, the average price of electricity for residential homes was 11.72 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011, according to the official government numbers at http://www.eia.gov/electricity/sales_revenue_price/pdf/table5_a.pdf.
A typical desktop computer in 2013 draws up to 450W maximum. Let’s assume it draws 300W when running as a Minecraft server. That means it draws 0.3 kW/hour, or 216 kW/month.
216 kW at 11.72 cents per kilowatt-hour is $25.31/month, or 69% more than the cost of a Minecraft Realms subscription!
What about other countries? The average price for electricity in the United Kingdom is 17.85 cents/kWh, or $38.55/month. Netherlands: 28.89 cents/kWh, or $62.40/month. Brazil: 34.20 cents/kWh, or $73.87/month. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing)
I live on the island of Kauai in Hawaii now. My electricity in 2013 costs 44 cents/kWh. If I still used my desktop computer as a server, a Minecraft server would cost $95/month!
I knew electricity would be a problem for my server, which I use for more than just Minecraft. So, I use a Mac Mini instead of a desktop or laptop as my server. It only draws a maximum of 85W, and it usually draws about 50W in normal use. That means it uses 36 kW/month, which costs $15.84/month. In other words, even with an energy-efficient server, I still end up paying over $15/month for electricity.
One might say that a self-hosted server could be turned off except at scheduled times. That would save lots of energy if, say, the server only operated 4 hours per day. However, such a scheme would be very annoying to maintain, and it would mess with people spread across different time zones. My server, for example, has people using it from five different time zones. Also, the server wouldn’t be available for other purposes while it was turned off, so that scheme wouldn’t work for people like me who use a server all day for music files, source control, project management, etc.
Clearly, Minecraft Realms is a good deal just on the basis of energy consumption. I haven’t even factored in the cost of server maintenance and administration.