I’m considering a business plan for people getting in to self-hosting. Essentially I sell you a Mikrotik router and a refurbished tiny x86 server. The idea is that the router plugs in to your home internet and the server into the router. Between the two they get the server able to handle incoming requests so that you can host services on the box and address them from the broader Internet.
The hypothesis is that $150 of equipment to avoid dozens of hours of software configuration is a worthwhile trade for some customers. I realize some people want to learn particular technologies and this is a bad fit for them. I think there are people out there that want the benefit of self-hosting, and may find it worth it to buy “self-hosting in a box”.
What do you think? Would this be a useful product for some people?
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Which problem(s) are you trying to solve? The networking issue of firewalls and port forwarding? The admin tasks of installing and configuring applications? The task nobody does of maintaining software and keeping it up-to-date?
Which problem(s) are you trying to solve? The networking issue of firewalls and port forwarding?
Within the scope of this question, yes. Also properly configuring IPv6, though that’s just to achieve the same things that port forwarding enables.
The admin tasks of installing and configuring applications?
That’s also on my list, but I was trying to keep the question focused. Do you think the answer makes a difference? In other words, if it was just networking would it be not worth it, but networking and application management would make it worth it?
I don’t think the networking part is part that needs solving. Modern AP/routers are pretty easy to configure and setup securely. Dunno - I’m definitely not in the target audience for what you’re doing though.
What is the aim? People who want to get into it, but does not know how, or experts? Think half of the attraction of selfhosting is the diy aspect.
What extra would this bring if people can just buy the parts cheaper?
And for those who only want the out of the box experience why would this be better than, let’s say a beestation? (Yeah price, I know, but you obviously would not have the same support level.)
What is the aim? People who want to get into it, but does not know how, or experts? Think half of the attraction of selfhosting is the diy aspect.
I don’t disagree, and I would imagine what I’m offering would only be useful to people who are very early and don’t yet know they enjoy the DIY aspect.
The aim, though, is this: I’ve enjoyed self-hosting. It’s given me some powers that most people don’t get to have who aren’t also technical professionals. I’m also deeply frustrated by the environment created by the various major tech companies. If I can, I’d like to lower the barrier for people to get some of those powers without having to become experts and to make it more feasible for them to do what they want to do, rather than just what they are permitted to do.
What extra would this bring if people can just buy the parts cheaper?
Much shorter time going from “how can I control some of my own data” to "I’m running NextCloud, and its kinda like iCloud/Google Drive/Whatever Microsoft does and it’s running right here under my control! Not everyone knows the path from buying parts online to having a working reverse-proxy and reasonable firewall rules. Also, standardization makes it much easier to support people, which is really what the business would be doing.
why would this be better than, let’s say a beestation?
I knew about Synology, but as a NAS product, which assumes a certain familiarity with backup schemes, etc. Kind of a prosumer-only thing. The Beestation is new to me, thanks for the tip. Quite possible what I’m proposing would have some overlap and compete with it, I’ll have to read up on it.
Needs serious market research to not flop out of the box.
It would make more sense to sell a management service
If we did, would you be comfortable giving the company a root SSH login to manage your system, or would you prefer a more limited method of access?
Neither honestly. However, I am also not really the unskilled user trying to self host
Okay, fair enough, any thoughts on what a good ‘management service’ might look like?
Ansible honestly. You can use Ansible to report on facts. Outside of that you Aldo could use Telegraf+influxdb+grafana
If I wanted that I would just buy Synology/QNAP/Zima, etc.
The tech savvy will just buy a Raspberry Pi and install yunohost on it.
Only if it didn’t have an insane markup for being pre-built.
I’d probably buy it.
Do you already have an idea of what kinds of things you’d want to run on it?
Honestly, not really. I’m just kind of at a point in my life where it’s something I’m thinking about looking into, and an out-of-the-box option like this would be really handy.
I probably would. However it has become increasingly obvious that the flaws with solutions so far have been in the organisation. Not so much the particular hardware or software. If I’m going to buy something I’d like some hope that it’ll be there in 5 or 10 or 20 years. So please if you go serious with this, look into worker-owned organizations because I’m tired of dodging profit-maximizing traps and pretend-non-profit landmines. If the people building and supporting the thing aren’t the ones deciding what to do with the revenue and profit, you’re the only one doing it and you’re going to make mistakes that will hurt them and us. And then you become a landmine to dodge.
These are great points, and I fully agree. I’d be interested in knowing what kind of license or corporate structure or contract would give you confidence that the organization is worth investing in. I could put all the software out with a really strong Affero license so that you’ve got the source code, but I get the impression that you, like me, want more than that. Corporations like Mondragon are interesting to me, and I’m aware of a few different tech cooperative organizations. I’m not confident that a cooperative structure alone is enough. Yes, it helps avoid the company taking VC money, shooting for the moon, failing, and then selling everything that’s not clearly legally radioactive. But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital and adjusting the EULA every few months until they have the right to sell off your baby photos.
I’ve been batting around the idea of creating a compliment to the “end-user license agreement” - the “originating company license agreement”. Something like a poison pill that forces the company to pay out to customers in the event of a data breach, sale of customer data, or other events that a would-be acquirer may think is worth it for them.
I’m just not sure yet what kinds of controls would be strong enough to convince people who have been burned by this sort of thing in the past. What do you think?
Purely on the product side, if I decide to buy it, I wouldn’t buy it for myself. I’d buy it for friends and family who are not that tech literate. Either to make my life easier to give them self-hosted services, or ideally for themselves to be able to do so. I want this product to be a non-shitty, open source “Synology,” from a firm I can trist to support it for a very long time. Doesn’t have to have that form factor. And I’m totally fine with an ongoing subscription. I’d like to be able to say - hey friend, buy this from ACME Co-op and sign up for their support plan. Follow the wizard and you’ll have Immich, Nextcloud, etc. A support plan might include external cloud HTTP proxy with authentication and SSL that makes access trivial. Similar to how Home Assistant’s subscription (Nabu Casa) works. It could also include a cloud backup. Perhaps at a different subscription rate.
I don’t know enough to say what the structure should be but this should not be possible:
But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital
It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group. If a sale is in the cards, a majority of the people in the org should have to approve for it to proceed. And this shouldn’t be advisory but a legal barrier to pass.
If I were to start a firm today, I’d be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I’d like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren’t the dumb kids.
I can also say that as a customer, the few worker co-ops I’ve able to buy things from give me a much more trustworthy impression than the baseline. They just behave differently. Noticeably more ethically.
But it doesn’t protect you against more insidious forces like the founders selling to private capital
It implies that the founders have more voting power and ownership than the rest of the people in the org. In my mind, everyone should have an equal vote, which should prevent a sale on the whim of the founders or another minority group.
I’m not confident that simple democracy is enough. While I do expect that a one-worker-one-vote system would make it harder to sell out, it’s still possible. I do think that a cooperative has many benefits. I just want to make it fatal to the business to go down certain dark paths: selling user data, seller user compute, selling user attention, etc.
I wish there were more examples of functional high-tech cooperatives I could learn lessons from.
If I were to start a firm today, I’d be looking into this because not only this is the kind of firm I’d like to work in, but I think so would quite a few people in software. And those aren’t the dumb kids.
I strongly agree with this sentiment.
The hypothesis is that $150 of equipment to avoid dozens of hours of software configuration
OK fair try, but you also need to sell me 20-25 TB of disk space on 5 spindles (plus a SSD for the bootdisk), 64 GB RAM (with a chance to go up to 128) and the CPU must have 16 threads or more.
What kind of workload do you run that makes you confident you need that much hardware? Do you think people just beginning could get buy on 4 cores and 8 GB RAM for a while? How long before you think most people need more?
This will be the spec for my next server. The current one is smaller, and several years old
I have several different requirements for my server, for example, my son does video editing and needs lots of storage. I want to experiment with more VM’s and containers, therefore RAM and threads.
Do you think people just beginning could get buy on 4 cores and 8 GB RAM for a while?
For most people I think they just want to have some NAS and a reliable machine. But please grant them 16 GB, otherwise they would ask why their laptop has so much more than their server :-)
No. People who want the benefit of self housing without worrying about hardware will rent a vps or something simpler. The hard part of hardware isn’t the purchase, it’s the maintenance.
Also, why the separate router?
I agree with this. Self-hosting requires the user to understand their network, their software, how it all interacts.
If you provide a hardware product and call it a solution, people are going to expect a turn-key solution like a plug-and-play router.
You’re going to end up supporting a bunch of newbies who, by no fault of their own, can’t tell you an error code in the console let alone whatever UI you give them.
I think a better solution would be a course that walks newbies through self hosting.
People who want the benefit of self housing without worrying about hardware will rent a vps or something simpler.
That’s certainly an option. I think of dedicated hardware as working for several different people, some of which care a great deal about not using a VPS provider because they don’t trust them with their data, or don’t trust them to be around for a long time, or don’t trust them not to raise the prices.
The hard part of hardware isn’t the purchase, it’s the maintenance.
I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve been doing hardware for a long time as a hobbyist and I sometimes forget how far I’ve come. It sounds like you might be somewhat like me in that regard. I’m often surprised when people see assembling system parts and flashing an OS as a complex, inscrutable task.
What do you see as the hard part of maintenance? Scheduling time to do it? Unexpected errors or failures?
I would be happy if I could pay you to just set up and periodically check my setup. I only say that because I would probably want to put together something that cost more than $150. But I am absolutely overwhelmed by what I don’t know. Every tutorial I read gives me more questions than answers.
I just want to self host, share it with a close circle of friends, and keep everyone else’s noses out of my business.
Would you rather pay a higher price per single instance ($100 to fix something you broke on accident) or pay a lower constant price ($10-$20/month) like insurance?
Would you rather get help in the form of a conversation, a custom script someone wrote for you, or by giving admin access to the company to directly fix things?
I would be willing to pay an initial setup fee followed by some maintenance fee. I would expect the initial fee to be significant due to a custom setup/requirements. (I am talking just setup, not cost of hardware/ physical installation).
Unique home network with 2 managed switches.
Self hosted security DVR, automated computer backup, photo backup, network drive for document storage and then self hosting a Jellyfin server along with a torrent service.
(I am sweating just thinking about trying to set that up)
Storage will be a RAID setup where I can just upgrade by throwing a new drive into an open slot and replace (as necessary) existing drives by just swapping them out and server automatically handles the data management.
I have a VAGUE idea of what that takes
Maintenance would cover service calls to resolve problems due to security updates/patches, end of life upgrades, normal planned maintenance type of stuff.
User caused issues should be extra :) (i.e. I was just trying to install a Minecraft server)
Couple hundred bucks, at least, for setup. And that seems cheap.
I would pay $10-20 a month for a maintenance fee after an initial setup fee.
I would MUCH rather give my money to an individual sysadmin than a corporate megalith that will use my membership to force an arbitration clause to any future service of theirs I use. Fuck the mouse. Fuck em all. I tried to do it right and that still want enough for them.
I am absolutely overwhelmed by what I don’t know. Every tutorial I read gives me more questions than answers.
I felt that in the very core of my being.
Looking at my setup, sometimes I look back and wonder how tf I’ve made it this far. Dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of searching, reading, watching YouTube tutorials, and I feel like little has stuck with me. If the boot drive in my proxmox server takes a shit on me before I manage to figure out how to properly back everything up before that inevitable failure occurs, I’ll be back at square one (as in, still clueless and destined to spend dozens/hundreds of hours getting things set back up and configured).
I can say that I am a bit more familiar with the linux terminal now than I was a couple years ago when I first started, so there is some learning and growth taking place. But I’m still just a wee lad still trying to figure out how to simply stand up on my own. And heaven help me if an actual problem arises.
Would only be worth it if you created a system for easily deploying applications on an already set up subnet with routing preconfigured.
Like set up a single server kubernetes distribution like microk8s or minikube on the server with metalLB and ingress already preconfigured on the server and router. You could also give instructions on how to install a GUI like Lens and how to use it to deploy a few things. Probably using workstation applications would be better than a web UI like Portainer to keep the server lighter, but either might work.
Hi, I’m your customer base.
I’m a complete novice, no network or coding experience, but not afraid of computers either. I’m pretty worried about messing up something serious due to lack of knowledge.
In the end, I didn’t choose Synology or the like due to:
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lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.
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price. I’d pay 10% or 50% more for a good pre-configured system, but not 3-4x more (which is just the general feeling I get from Synology)
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lack of configurability. I’m still not sure what I would like to do (and be able). I know I want to replace some storage services, replace some streaming services, control my smart home, maaaaybe access my files remotely, and probably some other stuff. I may want to have email or a website in the future, but that’s not on my radar right now.
If there were some plug-and-play hardware/software solution that was still affordable and open, it would be a good choice for me.
I appreciate your thought process here! Where did you end up as far as self-hosting?
I’m currently about halfway through setting up a home server on an old/refurbished Dell PC. It has enough compute to transcode if needed, but no more. I’ll have to upgrade the storage to set up RAID. For software, I am running xubuntu, which offers the benefits of the great community and documentation of Ubuntu. It is very beginner friendly, but is a bit simpler and lighter than gnome. I’m running everything I can as Docker containers.
Nice. That’s similar to what I’m doing: Ubuntu LTS server running containers, orchestrated by Docker Compose, with a Traefik reverse proxy in front of everything. I’m curious about TrueNAS SCALE though, wondering if that would suit my needs.
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I admire the thought of lowering the barrier to entry to start self-hosting for “normies”. Not sure where you are located, but where I am, this price point is not realistic even for used equipment, not including RAM or storage. I’m not really sure what value add you are bringing to the table that one wouldn’t get from just buying used hardware from an office surplus and if one is very inexperienced in self-hostong, looking into something like LTT is partnered with like Hexos.
A small home media server running off a raspberry pi could be that cheap.
this price point is not realistic even for used equipment, not including RAM or storage
I’m doing experiments currently on a refurbished Intel i5-6500 with 8Gb DDR4 and a 0.5Tb SSD. It’s tiny, quiet (~45 decibels) and so far runs ~8 watts idle, 25 watts normal usage. I haven’t stress-tested the power draw. The router I’m testing with is a Mikrotik hEX lite 5. That’s around ~$150, though clearly if you are accustomed to more “rack-mount” style homelab these will seem very modest.
What I’m testing for now is getting representative loads on the devices to see how they perform.
I’m not really sure what value add you are bringing to the table that one wouldn’t get from just buying used hardware from an office surplus and if one is very inexperienced in self-hostong, looking into something like LTT is partnered with like Hexos.
Oh, I totally agree, my value add just isn’t there if you are experienced at hosting. The value add is to help people get started, and to keep them running at a modest level. Not everyone wants to experiment with Kubernetes at home or train LLMs. Some folks just want a password manager, a shared calendar, something to organize their tax documents, a pihole, and a Minecraft server for their kids.
I don’t follow LTT, I was under the impression it was more hardware reviews for the experienced than tutorials to help people get started.
I’ve read a bit about Hexos, I’m thinking of some similar things, and it would make sense to work with them. I’m excited for their coming beta.
I recently upgraded my homelab/self-hosting server from an old Dell T410 with dual X5650’s (2 - 6 core/12 thread CPU) and 24 GB ram to an old Dell Optiplex (7020 I think) with an i5-4590 (4 core/4 thread) and 32 GB ram. Its barely enough for a proxmox host with 5 VMs; but way faster than the old T410.
If you are offering some sort of self-hosting box, would it be bundled with some sort of software for someone to easily spin up whatever services they want?
Are you going to be able to make money at the $150 mark with all this hardware and configuration? If you are targeting people who are new to self-hosting, it will need to be a complete package (will need to have ram and storage installed).
An interesting customer base might be small communal organisations. At our local scouts troop I had a discussion with a friend, who is also in IT. His idea (not fleshed out) was to provide small local organizations with a stack of already configured open source software to support the typical needs of such organizations (like a wordpress website, a nextcloud for file storage and common calender, limesurvey for surveys and event registration, mailman3 for mailing lists,…). Depending on the needs you could sell the initial setup process (your personal work in setting up and skill transfer) or ongoing support. Though such organizations normally don’t have much money to give away. So probably its not really worth your time financially (though probably really appreciated in the community).
