What will you do if your startup suddenly takes off?
That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.
That's the main advantage of the cloud early on -- flexibility.
Sit back and relax? Being massively overprovisioned is a benefit of homelabs.
there are many dimensions to provisioning, not all of them are one ebay/amazon/newegg purchase away.
you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).
Frankly, i think that the time when your startup is taking off might be the right time to start thinking about moving to the cloud (or to a proper datacenter).
If anything, if your startup is taking off then you're starting to get a real sense of what kind of compute and storage you actually need, and can maybe negotiate accordingly (eg: long-term committment for resources in some clouds give you very relevant discounts).
EDIT: regarding the internet connection... on a consumer connection, most contracts include a minimal guaranteed bandwidth that's usually way lower than the advertised peak bandwidth. i wouldn't be surprised to discover people getting throttled at those speeds if they start getting serious traffic...
> you could hardly get a symmetrical 10 gbps internet connection at home (in most places), and if you do it would be unlikely to be timely (and in that case, your business could probably be suffering).
if your startup takes off and you can't get a professional connection on time... it might just drive users away. particularly paying users.
and depending on where you are, that might not even be possible at all.
This does presuppose you have a business class internet connection, of course.
What if your internet goes out? Even with a business line, I've had to wait five days for them to replace a fiber line that a squirrel chewed through.
What if the power goes out? I just had a five hour power outage. Even if you have a battery backup, when the neighborhood power is out for a while, the ISP equipment will die when its batteries go out.
What if your hardware dies and you aren't home to switch it out, assuming you even have spare hardware?
What if your A/C goes out and your server overheats and has to get shut down?
All of these are things you usually don't have to deal with when using the cloud or even a $5 VPS, because they design for all of these failure cases from the start.
If you're running a business from your house, it is by definition a lifestyle business, and that's not really what we are talking about here.
Any business that you can run from a home server
with a residential business line is not the kind
of business we are talking about here.
Depends on what you're trying to do.
You are not going to be able to run a Netflix competitor out of your garage.
You're not going to get high availability without some significant investment and even then you'll be at the mercy of whatever your ISP is doing upstream in the event of a power outage. I live in an area where we average something like 99.99% power uptime, but not everybody is so lucky.
You could, potentially, host something that serves up something non bandwidth-intensive to tens of thousands of users, give or take an order of magnitude. (SaaS, APIs, etc) You can do a lot of interesting things with a homelab and some of them are potentially profitable.
Perhaps more crucially: you're not exactly locked in to a homelab. You can start with that and once you reach a certain point, migrate to colo or cloud.
I have enough battery backup to run my rack for about 30 minutes, more if I shut down a node. That’s more than enough time for me to set up my generator and route power; it has an extended gas tank and can power the rack, fridges/freezers, fans, etc. for over 24 hours. I periodically run drills on this to ensure it’s doable, and that the gear works as expected.
If I’m not home, then yes, the latter would fail. Dual hardware failure is an unlikely scenario; single node failure is handled between K8s and Proxmox clustering.