Checkmk Community · Infrastructure monitoring
Self-hosting Checkmk Community for 100 servers: the cost
At 100 monitored servers, Checkmk Community needs 3.1 GB of memory and 15 GB of disk. That fits the Starter 4 GB at VPSServer for $22.00 a month. Add backups and the time it takes to look after and the real figure is $139 a month.
- Server
- $22.00Starter 4 GB, 2 vCPU
- Backups
- $4.40provider snapshots
- Your time
- $1121.5 h a month at $75
- All in
- $139per month
- First-time setup
- $450about 6 hours, once
How 3.1 GB was arrived at
2 GB covers the stack at rest, every container the project ships included. 100 monitored servers at 5 MB each adds 0.5 GB, giving 2.5 GB. Adding 25% headroom so the machine is not run at its ceiling gives 3.1 GB, and the smallest plan at or above that is the Starter 4 GB with 4 GB.
Disk works the same way: 10 GB to begin with, plus 0.05 GB per server, so 15 GB against the 80 GB the plan includes.
The free, open-source edition of Checkmk, with the Nagios core and round-robin metric files that do not grow once created. It installs as one package containing every component it needs. The figures are our estimate: Checkmk does not publish a requirements table we could cite.
Over three years
| Period | Server and backups | Your time | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup, once | — | $450 | $450 |
| Per month | $26.40 | $112 | $139 |
| First year | $317 | $1,800 | $2,117 |
| 36 months | $950 | $4,500 | $5,450 |
If you do not price your own time, the 36-month figure is $950 instead. Both numbers are real; which one applies depends on whether the hours would otherwise have been billable.
What you would be paying instead at this size
| Commercial product | Tier | Per month | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | Infrastructure Pro | $1,500 | $1,361 | breakdown |
| PRTG Network Monitor | Subscription | $310 | $171 | breakdown |
A positive difference means self-hosting is cheaper at this size, with your time already counted.
Where to put Checkmk Community
3.1 GB of memory and 15 GB of disk is what this needs at 100 servers. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Starter 4 GB at VPSServer for $22.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The VPSServer link above is an affiliate link, run through the same programme as our Kamatera link; VPSServer and Kamatera belong to the same group. If you sign up through it we may earn a commission, but the programme does not state an amount for VPSServer. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
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