Should I rent a storage server or buy a NAS?

Why is a NAS at home not enough on its own?

RAID protects you from a dead drive, not from a fire, a theft or ransomware on your network. All of those reach every drive in the box at once.

The usual rule is 3-2-1: three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy offsite. A NAS gives you the second copy. The third has to live somewhere else: a friend's house, a cloud bucket, or a rented server.

A rented server is a good third copy because it speaks the protocols a NAS already uses. Synology Hyper Backup, for instance, can target an rsync server, as shown in Can Synology Hyper Backup back up to a rented rsync server? The full menu of targets is in What is the best offsite backup for a NAS?

What does a NAS cost to run each month?

Beyond the purchase, a NAS costs power and replacement drives. We do not quote hardware prices here: they change every week. Use your own receipt in this formula:

monthly cost = purchase price ÷ months you keep it + power + replacement drives ÷ months

The running costs can be worked out from public figures. These are calculations, not measurements:

• Power: Seagate's Exos X16 data sheet gives about 5 W per drive at idle. Eight drives draw about 40 W, or 28.8 kWh in 30 days. At the EU average household price of €0.2832 per kWh, that is about €8.16 a month, before the chassis itself.
• Failures: Backblaze measured a 1.73% annualized failure rate across 354,415 drives in Q2 2026. Eight drives would see about one failure every seven years, on average.
• Time: updates, scrubs and drive swaps are yours.

With a rented hold, all of that is in the price. When a drive fails, open a ticket: the team has it replaced at no cost, and rebuilding the array on the new drive is up to your setup.

How long does the first upload to a rented server take?

The first copy is limited by your upload speed, not by the server. After it, incremental backups send only what changed. This table is line-rate arithmetic; real transfers run slower:

When is renting the better choice, and when is buying?

Rent when space, power or distance is the problem; buy when local speed and ownership matter most.

Renting wins when:

• You need an offsite copy and have no second building.
• You have no quiet, cool corner for a box of spinning drives.
• You want an endpoint on the internet, without opening your home network.
• You need 24 TB to 160 TB now, without paying for it all at once.

Buying wins when:

• You edit or stream large files at home and want local network speed.
• You plan to keep the hardware for many years.
• You want the drives physically in your hands.

Either way, encrypt what leaves your home. You can encrypt every data drive with LUKS or ZFS native encryption; the keys stay with you and nobody on the team ever asks for them. The choices are in What is client-side encryption for backups? A rented copy can also be made ransomware-resistant: see How do I make backups immutable on my own server?

What does renting a storage server cost at Basalthold?

Hold 24 $110.99, Hold 40 $201.09, Hold 100 $377.05, Hold 160 $561.39, per 30 days. Longer terms cost less: Hold 24 is $932.31 for 12 months. No setup fee is charged, neither on the first order nor on a renewal.

Renting does not mean a rack of special controllers. Of 23 storage-server sellers Basalthold checked on 2 November 2026, only 4 named a hardware RAID controller. On a hold, you build the array in software. The operating system sits on its own SSD (two mirrored SSDs on the larger holds); the data drives arrive blank and unpartitioned, so you can build ZFS, an mdadm array or a set of independent disks. If you want the team to prepare a RAID 6 or RAID 10 array before delivery, say so to support before the server is handed over.

Every hold, with its hardware, is on the pricing page.