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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?

koncertejo ,

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

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.

EliRibble OP ,

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?

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.

EliRibble OP ,

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 , (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

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 , (edited )
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

A_Union_of_Kobolds ,

I’d probably buy it.

EliRibble OP ,

Do you already have an idea of what kinds of things you’d want to run on it?

helenslunch ,
@helenslunch@feddit.nl avatar

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

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
AP WiFi Access Point
ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS HTTP over SSL
LTT Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel
NAS Network-Attached Storage
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

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

GregorTacTac ,
@GregorTacTac@lemm.ee avatar

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

EliRibble OP ,

I’m not aware of a script alone that could do it, assuming you bought some hardware that came with Windows and wanted to run Linux. Is it possible these days to install Linux from within Windows? I’ve been flashing via disks for too long now.

I do know that some routers are scriptable, but not all routers are, so it may not be possible to do things like expose a port on the Internet with just scripts on whatever router they have.

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