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?
From reading the comments, I think you could be a lot leaner by selling the $100 setup fee, and telling people which “kit” is supported, and they buy that on their own.
That way you don’t have to deal with any of the physical infrastructure of buying/selling/storing hardware, and people can do some customization.
However I do think you’d need to put some restrictions in place so that people don’t buy cheap crap that doesn’t work and expect you to set it up and support it. They have to buy the kit or other compatible hardware.
I’m not sure what services you’d support, but personally I’d be interested in something like a personal introduction and setup of
- docker
- proxmox
- yunohost
- backups / restore (practice restoring)
- smb shared folder
- pihole / pivpn (can you have wire guard and openvpn setup at the same time for different uses?
Maybe migration of
- nextcloud
You could make different prices depending on what service they want, kind of like a bike stop.
I wouldn’t want a perpetual subscription, but I could stomach something like $100 setup + $5/mo for limited support for a year.
Best thing for me is that community support also exists for all these things too, but it’s hard to do it on your own sometimes.
I’m not in the market, but I’ve actually had similar thoughts of building a project on top of NixOS that’s focused on self-hosting for homes and small businesses. I recently deployed my own router/server on a BeeLink mini PC and instead of using something like OpenWRT, I used NixOS, systemd-networkd, nftables, etc.
DM me if you want to discuss more. I think the idea has potential and I might be interested in helping if you can get the business model right (even if it just ends up being some FOSS thing).
150$ is rather ambitious for what you are describing as a custom made low power server. Managing to build something… Anything commercial out of new, hell even refurbished parts that has enough horse power to run anything more than a pihole/DNS server at this price point would be a challenge and a half. If you’re going refurbished/2nd hand, you’re likely gonna spend half of that on just shipping the parts to you.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the price of new low end parts and vastly overestimating the capabilities and availability of old micro servers. I’d say something like this would work at a price range of around 300~400$ (and even that’s ambitious imo).
And even then, that’s a NICHE audience you’d be targeting. It would be people who don’t wanna pay subscriptions, but also don’t wanna be bothered to spend a day or 2 figuring out how to set up a simple linux box on an old computer they have. I’m not saying that audience doesn’t exist, it’s just veeeeery niche.
Thanks, yeah, there’s a lot of work for us to do in testing hardware and understanding what a common workload (if such a thing exists) would need.
Do you have any particular evidence that causes you to think the audience would be niche or wouldn’t want to pay subscriptions? I can understand if this is just an opinion you hold, but if there’s data or experience behind it, that would be good to know.
Anecdotally, the majority of people I’ve seen who self host are doing it to replace subscription services. This ranges anywhere from piracy to libre office. So, they’re not gonna pay you a subscription for something they can do themselves.
The audience is niche because you’re aiming at a subset of a subset of a subset of people. You’re looking to sell this to someone who:
- Doesn’t want to pay for a service they can do by themself (self-hosters)
- Has the knowledge and desire to handle networking (no amount of preconfiguration will make them not have to set up which ports their services need while allowing freedom)
- But doesn’t have the time/energy to do it themself
- Can afford to shell out a rather large amount of money ($150 is a lot to many people, and as the other person brought up; you’ll likely end up selling it for much more than this after manufacturing costs)
- For a piece of equipment that is eclipsed by a 3 year old desktop computer from eBay
The amount of people who self host anything is already abysmally low - just look at the social media user count. There are more than twice as many people on r/pathofexile (which is already pretty niche) as on r/selfhosted. Obviously reddit isn’t the end-all be-all of representation in that way, but you can definitely get an idea of trends from it.
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).
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:
-
lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.
-
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)
-
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.
