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

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

Isn't that basically just a commercial NAS? Go buy a Synology NAS, or get fancy w/ TrueNAS. You don't need an entry-level enterprise-grade router at all, you can just plug the NAS in anywhere and you're golden. You can usually install a few services like Plex/Jellyfin or HomeAssistant alongside the data storage if you like.

If that's not going to work for you, you probably have a good idea of what will work for you. For me, a tiny x86 server isn't going to cut it, because I want a beefier CPU to run CI/CD for my programming projects, so a beefier, modern CPU is quite valuable. That's totally overkill if all you want is a simple streaming setup with 1-2 transcoded streams.

So I think there are two main markets here:

1. just give me something that works - these will flock to pre-configured solutions, like Synology or TrueNAS
2. I want something specific - they'll DIY components together to build their own custom solution

The only other group I can think of is the group that can't afford 1 and doesn't know enough to do 2, but I really don't think that's a particularly big group, and they'd be better off reusing something they already have instead of getting some off-the-shelf solution.

I could absolutely be wrong here, that's just my $0.02.

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.

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

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.

What's the value-add over just buying a SFF PC?

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.

Why would I need a separate router for that? I'd need to configure the main router anyway.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Permanently Deleted

https://www.freedombox.org/ ?

It would make more sense to sell a management service

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.

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

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).

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.

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.)

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.

I'd probably buy it.

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

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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