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

skilltheamps , 9 hours ago

How will you provide long term maintenance of their server for a one time payment of 150$?

Deello , 7 hours ago

Raspberry pi was able to do it with $35.

atzanteol , 6 hours ago

Raspberry Pi is not a server. That people use it as one does not mean it’s fit for purpose.

Deello , 5 hours ago

The fact that it’s an option that even remotely works is my point. They sell hardware. They don’t support software. The community does that. There is something to be gained from having a uniform platform for learning self hosting responsibly.

A Raspberry pi isn’t particularly great at any one thing. It’s greatest strength comes in bundling everything you need in a box at an affordable price. Once you know where your pain points are then you can build/design a system that overcomes those shortcomings.

Having a starter kit would be an easy way to get more people in the space. Would it cost $35 of course not. Level1Techs made their KVM to meet their own requirements and then the community benefits. To me, this project has that kind of energy. Or at least the potential for it.

EliRibble OP , 5 hours ago

How will you provide long term maintenance of their server for a one time payment of 150$?

My current thinking is the margin on the hardware would be intentionally low, essentially the cost of the hardware %+10 for configuring it a bit, installing NixOS, etc.

The business would survive on support and hosted services. Something like $20/month which gets you access to support to answer questions, help configure applications, troubleshoot issues, etc. Possibly rolling upgrades of your installed software on your behalf. Alerts on urgent security vulnerabilities. Could also handle tricky things like custom DNS (email servers, certificates) and off-site backups. I’m not totally sure what all would be included, but the goal is to make money while providing value, not build a garden or rent-seek.

floofloof , 11 minutes ago

$20 per month would be enough to discourage me. It’s another relatively costly computer-related subscription and I already feel like I’m losing a battle to keep those minimal. There would have to be some very clear benefits for that price.

NeoNachtwaechter , 8 hours ago

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.

EliRibble OP , 4 hours ago

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?

NeoNachtwaechter , 20 minutes ago

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 :-)

sartalon , 17 minutes ago

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.

foggy , 9 hours ago

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.

EliRibble OP , 4 hours ago

That’s an interesting idea I hadn’t thought much about. I’ve been more focused on individuals than organizations. Do you have experience with tax-funded institutions? I assumed they generally have strict procurement rules and long support contracts with large established players by policy.

foggy , 27 minutes ago

Their procurement policy is basically “has it been recommended? Is anyone else using it? Is it cheap?”

I work in public sector.

jaggedrobotpubes , 1 hour ago

If I don’t have to fail to understand another “Docker’s not that bad | complete beginners’ tutorial” video, I’d sign up.

Although any commercial business will be dead or the new problem to avoid in 15 years.

ChillPill , 7 hours ago

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 , 6 hours ago

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

EliRibble OP , 4 hours ago

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.

ChillPill , 1 hour ago

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).

solrize , 7 hours ago

www.freedombox.org ?

halm , 7 hours ago

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

ChillPill , 6 hours ago

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 , 6 hours ago

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 , 6 hours ago

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)

ChillPill , 1 hour ago

I’m currently hosting like 5 vms on a proxmox host (mostly ubuntu vms- pihole, nextcloud, home assistant, etc), which is an i5 4590 with 32 gb ram and I’m running up against the limits of how much ram I can provision and if 2 or more of my vms are doing something intensive at the same time I’m pinning the CPU. I don’t think my use-case is that crazy for someone doing a little self-hosting.

gnuplusmatt , 1 hour ago

what’s your plan on teaching these people to maintain their selfhosted instances? Are you selling support? I mean you could script pulling and recreating containers, but without eyeballs on it, that stuff will die eventually.

helenslunch , 2 hours ago

If I wanted that I would just buy Synology/QNAP/Zima, etc.

possiblylinux127 , 2 hours ago

It would make more sense to sell a management service

avidamoeba , 8 hours ago (edited 8 hours ago)

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.

EliRibble OP , 4 hours ago

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?

avidamoeba , 3 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

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.

avidamoeba , 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

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.

_bcron , 8 hours ago

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

EliRibble OP , 5 hours ago

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

Interesting, so if you got hardware and it came with guides, what kind of guides would you want? I would assume something layered. At the top is just “I want to install these 5 apps and use them, I don’t care how it works” and in the middle is “I’m ready to SSH into the router and create some VLANs for fun” at the bottom is something like “I want to flash my own firmware with appropriate certificates for secure boot and my own root chain of trust on the server hardware”.

_bcron , 4 hours ago (edited 4 hours ago)

The guides, basically a quick and dirty walkthrough on setting it up, hopefully a few explanations about things, and a handful of common troubleshooting tips. Also pointers to a handful of communities that have helpful info in case something obscure pops up.

Basically, teach a man how to fish, as opposed to giving him a couple.

I think a lot of people who would otherwise dabble with a DIY home server never try because it’s pretty technical (beyond typical ‘build a pc’ stuff) so I think the education that would come with the hardware would be appreciated by many. Help them get their foot in the door by making the dive a little less scary. Nothing too over the top but point them to the places where people hang out discussing the more technical crap for when that day comes

acockworkorange , 2 hours ago

I could see this being a use case for a NixOS deployment where your company manages the configuration file and versioning of the system, as well as providing support. Over time, I’d you’re diligent about building documentation based off of each support request, you’ll end up with a personalized guide. And if your customer decides take a break or quit entirely, they have a configured system that doesn’t lock them in into something too esoteric.

Disclaimer: I only know of Nix, never used it because I just don’t manage that many machines to be worth my while to learn it.

Nimrod , 3 hours ago

Hard agree. In fact, I think there’s a market for JUST the guides. It’s true that there’s a TON of guides out there already, from old blogs to YouTube, but the issue is: all of them start or end with: “your use case might differ, so perhaps this solution isn’t for you.” Or “make sure this setup is compatible with your specific hardware”

For example: I want to set up some sort of backup/cloud storage type system. Well there’s about 1400 ways to accomplish that. I can easily just grab one and go, but I’ll always wonder- should I have done this a different way? Would my life be easier/more secure if I chose a different set up?

So offering hardware that is compatible with whatever “stack” of services included would be a huge plus. Sorta like getting a raspberry pi and following a specific raspberry pi tutorial- you know the issues you get aren’t gonna be due to incompatibility.

I think it really boils down to the scale of one’s home lab- are you just tinkering to get some skills and make something cool? Or are you hoping to do something much much bigger? Different software solutions fit those extremes differently.

Sorry, got off rambling there. I guess I’ve been down the home lab hardware/software wormhole for too long these last few weeks.

atzanteol , 6 hours ago

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?

EliRibble OP , 5 hours ago

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?

atzanteol , 2 hours ago

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.

acockworkorange , 3 hours ago

I’d buy your services to configure my TrueNAS server right now.

mspencer712 , 8 hours ago

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 , 7 hours ago

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 , 6 hours ago

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 , 7 hours ago

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 , 6 hours ago

nixos scripts

What’s a nixos script?

ForgotAboutDre , 5 hours ago

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.

tux0r , 3 hours ago

A viable alternative is Guix, which uses Scheme for its scripts and could also use the Hurd kernel instead of Linux, but works the same.

EliRibble OP , 5 hours ago

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product. … The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

I think this is a great point, it doesn’t help much to create a business that ends up with the same incentives and the same end-game as the existing systems.

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.

That is precisely what I’m looking to build. I don’t want to get rich, I want people without 10 years of industry experience to get some of the benefits we have all been able to build for ourselves.