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Comment by nickorlow | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be very cool if a company sold a box that lets people self-host really easily.

Basically some mid-spec box that comes preinstalled with some nice web UI that lets you easily install popular self-hosted applications (immich, nextcloud, jellyfin, wireguard, etc..).

Ideally it'd let you host an at-home iCloud without having to go through the headache. A lot of people I know (including hobbyists & swes) don't self host because setting up a linux vm/box and configuring everything + maintenance would take too much time.

I think the biggest weakness with this is HA. Residential internet/power isn't the most reliable and even though my homelab server is up ~98% of the time, the 2% is VERY annoying and always happens at the worst times.

Security would also be another large concern. I'd imagine a bad actor would have a harder time getting into my iCloud/Google Photos than my immich server.

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Have you checked out Umbrel[1]?

You can self-host Umbrel on your own hardware[2]. I'm not sure if they allow for multiple nodes to stay in sync. If (/once) they do, it'd solve for disasters / availability as well.

[1]: https://umbrel.com

[2]: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel

I have not. It looks extremely interesting and is basically what I was thinking of.

While we haven't made a box, we made the software side in GoLang [1]

This lets you host the most popular self hosted apps with a click[2] and you get an IP from us. :-)

[1] https://github.com/ipv6rslimited/cloudseeder

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjklYTxE8ks

Don't forget backups. They should probably be offsite and cost of that is generally what pushes me into keeping my Dropbox Plus account.

Good point. Another issue I'm worried about.

I'm suprised at how many of my homelab friends don't maintain proper backups.

Every time my homelab friends get more drives, the discussion is always "what else am I going to store/host?", which is a more exciting topic/prospect than a "just in case" backup. And every time they grow their storage, the cost of an equal or larger sized backup solution increases as well, making the likelihood of purchase even less.

In that sense, I guess we aren't as far off from the SMBs that don't have backups in place, although if you ask the homelab people about it the answer is usually "I can live without most of this if it gets lost".

> the answer is usually "I can live without most of this if it gets lost"

I'd imagine 90% of homelab storage is movie/tv show 'backups' and aren't that sensitive

Dropbox was the hardest of my data subscriptions to drop. I needed a new NAS (well a first real one), and got a "cheap" synology and 2 7TB drives. I then used their dropbox sync to synchronize my NAS with DropBox and vice versa, and then to also sync to my backblaze b2 storage account.

After a few months of it working without a hitch, I killed my dropbox subscription. Now I pay a few pennies for my NAS a month, and $3/mo for backblaze.

https://www.freedombox.org/

I think Synology lets you do that? I'm sure I've seen someone running things like Pihole on them. Not necessarily as integrated as you're talking about though.

https://www.synology.com/en-uk/dsm/feature/docker

I struggle with the difference between "lab" and "production". You may start messing around with Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi but when your partner can't turn on the lights with a voice command you're going to find that you need something more resiliant.

Yeah I'm more thinking of something everyday consumers could use.

As long as you stick to what's in Synology's package manager it's pretty end-user friendly. Though that only covers the normal file/photo/video/contact/calendar/backup management stuff. To set up a pihole you'd have to configure the docker image or run a VM, which is probably beyond the standard user's repertoire.

For friends and family unraid is nice because it has a much bigger repertoire of "Apps" (mostly docker containers with some minimal UI integration). It demands a lot more from the user than Synology and looks a lot scarier, but there are no difficulty spikes. Once somebody knows how to use it it's pretty smooth sailing without having to learn anything new.

Unraid does look pretty nice. Synology definitely has difficulty spikes, and then you have to search for some article or tutorial.

That's fair, Synology can be confusing, and it's permission system is frustrating. However, my experience has been that many people use Synology, and I have found detailed articles about everything I've ever wanted to do with it, including adding unsupported 5GbE USB ethernet adapters. It's docker support is nice and makes it easy to setup and run infrastructure like MySQL, postgres, redis, iperf3, and apps like nextcloud, firefly III, only office, etc. It manages certs per-domain (import existing or have it use lets encrypt), and the reverse proxy handles multiple domains and sub domains and makes it easy to remotely access individual apps (or hosts and ports) by redirecting port 80 to 443 and then 443 to whatever the particular docker port is (or IP address and port of something else on your LAN). I also like that the apps can run on my SSD-only RAID storage, and then I have a separate large RAID on spinning disks for NAS storage. Then the Synology devices, fiber ONT, router, main switches are plugged into my UPS backup. For personal stuff I like the Synology platform because it's hassle free, and I think the tutorials by random users makes it approachable to consumers.

Start9 offers this. No experience with their servers, but looks interesting: https://start9.com/

Nice! I'll have to check it out

additionally, a cloud version of what I described above would be cool too. Would also eliminate a the HA concern and partially the security concern.

Best of both worlds: replicate across friends and families similarly self-hosted all-in-one boxen.

I don't think people want to replicate their photos library to boxes that their friends have admin access to

The cloud version of that is pretty much shared web hosting. Lots of providers use Softaculous [1] or similar solutions to offer one-click install for popular apps. Of course that won't run wireguard and you are pretty locked in to PHP (and sometimes python), but for Nextcloud etc. it's an easy solution.

Or you can go one step further and just go with a managed solution. For example Hetzner has a managed NextCloud, then you don't even have to worry about updating that.

https://www.softaculous.com/

I love this idea so much!

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