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Would you buy "self-hosted in a box" hardware?

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?

Decronym Bot , (edited )

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS HTTP over SSL
LTT Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.

[Thread for this sub, first seen 9th Sep 2024, 20:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Only if it didn’t have an insane markup for being pre-built.

atzanteol ,

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?

ChillPill ,
@ChillPill@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

A small home media server running off a raspberry pi could be that cheap.

solrize ,

www.freedombox.org ?

halm ,
@halm@leminal.space avatar

Was my first impulse too, but looking at their app selection now, it seems kind of … inutile? Unsexy? Old?

ChillPill ,
@ChillPill@lemmy.world avatar

Dual Core ARM Cortex-A7 processor running at 1GHz

1GB DDR3 RAM memory

Doesn’t seem like you could self-host a whole lot with that…

solrize ,

It was ok at the time, and if it isn’t ok now, that means you want to run something that is too bloated for its own good.

Really though, special hardware for this doesn’t make too much sense. A raspberry pi with two ethernet interfaces would be great, but if you can live with ethernet plus wifi, the current rpi’s will do it. Otherwise there are lots of similar boards that really do have two ethernet.

I have not really felt much use for self hosted server hardware at home. I use VPS’s for that and it’s less hassle. Maybe it doesn’t count as completely self hosted, but conceptually it’s a miniature colo box.

Maxy ,

Coming from someone who started selfhosting on a pi 2B (similar-ish specs), you’d be surprised. If you don’t need anything fast or fancy, that 1GB will go a long way, and plenty of selfhosted apps require very little CPU. The only real problem I faced was that all HTTPS-related network tasks were limited at ~3MB/s, as that is how fast my pi could encrypt the data (presumably, I just saw my webserver utilising the entire CPU and figured this was the most likely explanation)

SweetMylk ,

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.)

koncertejo ,

The tech savvy will just buy a Raspberry Pi and install yunohost on it.

mspencer712 ,

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.

Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.

Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.

Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

BarbecueCowboy ,

We already have that, the first problem is we have like a dozen of them, a few are even well supported. The second problem is that usually the technical knowledge required to set up the systems are still lower than the technical knowledge required to keep it running.

mspencer712 ,

I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around a good security architecture for my mspencer.net replacement crap. Could I bug you for links?

I figured out a while ago to keep VM host management on a management VLAN, and I put each service VM on its own VLAN with heavy, service-specific firewalling and a private OS update repo mirror - but after hearing about ESXi jackpotting vulns and Broadcom shenanigans, I’ve gotten really disheartened. I’d love some safe defaults.

whereisk ,

I think a possibility is a series of open source anvil or nixos scripts that you can run on most hardware with minimal changes, in an extendable architecture of some kind to add or remove functionality and they perhaps get maintained by the community or some structure of the kind of Linux distributions.

This could enable people with minimal skills set up and maintain a reasonably useful but secure environment just by changing a few variables.

atzanteol ,

nixos scripts

What’s a nixos script?

ForgotAboutDre ,

Nixos is an os that’s defined by its config stored in .nix files. Everything is defined here all the software and configurations. Two people with the same script will have the exact same os.

Any changes you make that aren’t in the scripts won’t be present when you reboot.

You could maintain a very custom linux distribution (kinda) by just maintaining these config scripts.

So a user wouldn’t need to install all required software and dependencies. They could get a nixos and the self-host config and adjust some settings and have a working system straight after install.

GregorTacTac ,
@GregorTacTac@lemm.ee avatar

Why not just have a script that sets up all of the software one would want to host?

NeoNachtwaechter ,

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.

_bcron ,

I’m probably an ideal candidate for something like this but I’d much rather have someone walk me through setting my own thing up, rather than them handing me a bunch of preconfigured stuff that leaves me just as clueless.

If it came bundled around a bunch of DIY guides explaining the hows and the whys, it’d be far more appealling

avidamoeba , (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

breakingcups ,

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?

just_another_person , (edited )

Oooohhhhh boy. Another one of these 🤣

It’s not like a package thing you can sell if you’re not supporting it. Then you’re just selling hardware at an inflated price. It’s not even self-hosting at that point. Why wouldn’t you just pay a regular company for a product?

foggy ,

Market to tax funded institutions. If you can market “self hosted” as cheaper and easier than mother solutions you’ll have guaranteed clients for a long time.

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