The Austrian economy is doing pretty well, thank you. So are some major economies of countries bordering on Austria: Germany, Switzerland.
It is smart. I gain a lot of knowledge and insight from doing this, and these I increase my value as a freelancer, as pointed out above.
I only told you half the story. The other half is: a pair of Fujitsu Primergy TX 200 S7 servers, not dedicated to storage. ( Those were bought used, too, at about 1 year old they went for 1/3 of the original price. ) Each server has 2 sockets, and each socket has a Xeon E5 2420 processor with 6 cores / 12 threads. Makes 48 threads total. These little monsters run only when necessary. I am a freelance developer and software architect. Having this setup helps convincing customers that I know what I am doing, and know my way around storage and networks.
Of course it's more than € 625 / year. Electric power is part of my operationg expenses, and can be offset from taxable revenue at 100%. I currently run about € 600 / year in electricity bills related to computing. At € 0.20 / kWh, this indicates a round-the-year average of € 600
Happiness is twin floppies.