Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)
grumpy.systems
grumpy.systems
To wit, no serious business would use your services, so your market is pretty much limited to:
1.) Amateur hobbyists (very little money there)
2.) People with Bad Intentions (horrendous from a legal and security perspective, and ethics if that’s your thing)
3.) People in your social circle
They understand that if anything goes wrong I will offer a complete refund (which is $0), because they’re my friends. I couldn’t imagine doing it for other people though.
It also helps that they’re IT or at least interested in IT.
It's free and comes with no guarantees. If you need a domain or subdomain, you own it, pay for it, and just put a DNS record to the IP I tell you.
Self-hosting a service, website, or SaaS happens alot more than most people realize especially with fibre to the home, and even things like Starlink.
Sharing your home services doesn't seem mission critical, unless it is. It's easy to just pop in a QNAP or Synology for any individual for themselves.
Businesses who have data residency and processing requirements are live and well, and pay a premium.
The pendulum of cloud vs local is starting to swing the more AI models become available in datacentres to keep close to your data in 2025. Google just announced privately hosting to Gemini a few days ago iirc.
For self-hosting, one has to stabilize power, internet, and decide on equipment. This is orders of magnitude more doable, easier and cheaper every 5 years going back 15.
Just have to be clear on how experienced you are with this in the past and most recently. The cloud is ridiculously profitable and overpriced because in part of how much this has come down market just not used.
Of course there's knowledge involved, and again, there's plenty of people who quietly have this knowledge, and it's far easier to obtain now starting with something as simple as Proxmox and/or Docker.
"Residential proxies is based on traffic and purchase model. Pay as you go model starts at $7.35 per GB, and can be discounted as low as $1.84 per GB when purchased in bulk."
But I would guess this type of proxies is mostly use to send data rather than receive. You can access geo-locked sites through standard vpn.
Usually you only need some subset of the data per page load if you invest some time looking at dev tools you can probably find the API call you need and save yourself a few MB.
They all offer scraping APIs now too that can be cheaper for certain use cases where you only need a subset of the data that is actually loaded. Like $1.3 per 1k requests: https://oxylabs.io/products/scraper-api/web/pricing or $1 per 1k: https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper
https://faq.oxylabs.info/en/articles/8826164-restricted-targ...
Additionally I believe that $4/GB is an introductory price. When I went into the Oxylab dashboard, it showed me $8.
I’m curious if you can suggest a happy medium between curl-impersonate on VPS (dirt cheap) vs residential proxy ($8/gb)?
Personally I’m not trying to hit any of those common sites.
Most of them seem pretty reasonable?
"Entertainment & streaming" - who's trying to scrape netflix's library?
"Banking and other financial institutions" / "Government websites" / "Mailing" - seems far more likely it'll be used for credential stuffing than for "scraping".
"Ticketing" - seems far more likely that it'll get used by scalpers than for scraping
The main targets of scraping - e-commerce sites (for price comparisons) and social media networks (for user generated content) are fine to scrape. Is there some use case I'm missing here? Is there a huge contingent of people wanting to scrape ticketmaster or bank of america?
https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/me...
This is more than I expected a hobbyist to be able to pull off. How/where would you market to achieve this cash flow? If I could make $$$/mo with 1 computer at home, could I scale to $$$$/mo by adding compute/storage?
The target is $100/m per RTX 3090.
There’s collocation for mid tier usage patterns that’s cost effective maybe but I imagine it’s on the decline in general these days, and it never seemed that cost effective for hobby stuff unless you had a group of people who were splitting it.
Can you expand on this? I'm in the US and have 1 Gbps symmetrical fiber for $70/month. The US is a big country and some people will have it very slow, but usually not the same type of people who self-host.
This is a typical offer in fiber now in France.
Not that it matters because my equipment is 1 Gbps but at least I can flex :)
1. enthusiastic enough to have their own homelab and host their own kit.
2. have money and willing to spend on 'proper' hosting - either AWS/Azure/Hetzner/OVH style or cheap VPS style. You say "few hundred bucks a month" but a low quality virtual server starts from from $1/month - https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/ - and will be in a datacenter. You'd need a lot of customers or a very competitive offering to make even one hundred bucks profit every month.
3. have no money or don't want to spend money, using Oracle/Amazon free tier, SDF free shell, a free account from a friend with a homelab, etc. They don't make good customers.
That leaves people who have money and are willing to spend it on a low quality product instead of a higher quality product, which is basically your third option - friends who are giving you money and putting up with a worse deal out of friendship - charity, basically.
Edit: by "he" I mean Javier Tebas.
Problem with that is that there's perfectly valid legal reasons to censor individual websites and people will absolutely block all of CloudFlare to get them to go away. In this case, the corpofascist copyright owners that happen to own Spain's legislature decided "well, then we'll have to have no Internet when there's a soccer game, then".
But there's plenty of other legal or moral reasons to block a website, as much as the EFF would disagree. At the very least, CloudFlare has a sterling track record with providing infrastructure to cybercriminals. Every DDoS service puts their sales pages on CloudFlare, because when you happen to have a low-orbit ion cannon[0], the easiest thing to use it on is other vendors of low-orbit ion cannons. Same with malware, because it's very easy to get your malware on a CloudFlare server and a pain in the ass for antimalware tools to block it.
[0] LOIC is a "consumer grade" DDoS tool used predominantly by trolls and activists on 4chan in the late 2000s. Probably not what the DDoS vendors are using.
If you haven't heard of it, Storj is essentially a distributed S3 that's been around for many years now, and the way it works is that various people run Storj nodes while the Storj company runs a proxy server that breaks files up into small encrypted chunks and stores them across N peers for redundancy.
In my case, I back up my family photos/videos/documents to a Synology NAS, and my NAS is backed up to Storj. So when I run a Storj node with part of my disk space, the payments they give me essentially cover my own backups. I'm not making a ton of money or anything, but it's enough to pay for my own backups and that's a great deal.
If you're looking to do what the OP is talking about in a simple way, this is by far the best way I've found to do it.
Is there anything similar for compute?
Don't know if Golem is still around but they were/are doing something like that to commoditize GPU.
As with anything crypto there's a fractal of vaporware but at least those two had/have something.
By the way, I can't find the exact plan you described on the storj.io site, but there is this page that mentions STORJ tokens, so now I am confused as to whether this is a cryptocurrency thing or not.
https://storj.dev/support/account-management-billing/payment...
> Storj created the STORJ utility token as a medium of exchange on its decentralized cloud storage network. The STORJ utility token facilitates payments from people around the world for their use of the Storj network to store their data, and Storj uses it to pay our community of Storage Node Operators that rent their unused hard drive capacity and bandwidth to the network.
If you make any income (even $1), you still have to report it on your taxes though. You might or might not be obligated to do all the other business-y stuff, but I dont think "paying with storage" gets you off the hook for taxes if you are also getting paid for storage.
Also, things that aren't illegal where you are, but that are persecuted by some government. Whether by a rogue tyrant regime where you are, or by a foreign government that can reach out via "cyber" with impunity.
> Host stuff for friends - Friends are different because you probably trust them. A lot of the issues of customers taking advantage of you are mitigated by being friends.
Back before the term "homelab", I had DSL to my apartment, which I was using to host my own server, and a similarly-minded friend asked to temporarily colo his email server on my DSL.
Turns out friend's server also hosted some kind of political dissent Web site. My friend is a great friend, but he probably didn't realize he might've been "getting me on a list".
A lot of homelabs start with free discarded enterprise gear from work, which turns out to be both power-hungry and loud.
I ended up buying Atom servers for awhile, and modding them to be even quieter.
Then, recently, I offloaded all 24/7 stuff to cloud servers/services.
Start there. :-)
All it does is scrape jobs really. I was running it on a VPS but that requires a modicum more effort to keep secure. This thing is a rotting unpatched Debian 11 and is behind a NAT with no service ports exposed on public interface.
Some pros of laptop servers:
* Quiet.
* Low-ish power consumption.
* Doesn't take up much space.
* Built-in secure console.
* Built-in UPS.
Some cons:
* Limited in what drives you can put in it. Some laptops only support one drive, so you can't even do RAID mirroring. A real server will usually let you put at least a few high-capacity 3.5" drives in it, on SATA or better.
* Many laptops will overheat if run with the lid closed.
* If you get a burglary, a laptop is very likely to be stolen. (In a rack in a city apartment, I bolted down the servers with security head screws, and there was no way they were taking the whole cabinet, with a huge APC UPS anchoring it down.)
The benefits of the "built in UPS" didn't seem worth it to me because if my power is out, my internet is down anyway, and I don't run anything that needs that much uptime anyway.
You can always find free/cheap laptops.
AWS itself has nodes that can be preempted by higher paying users, no, with barely a few seconds to shut down your workflows?
You shouldn't misrepresent your home lab as an actual hosting business with staff and a data center and insurance and all that, but there still ought to be a way to loan out idle resources on an ephemeral basis.
The only real marginal cost to renting some of my idle capacity would be additional power use. Versus current draw, the power supply running maxed out 24/7 would increase my power bill by $36/mo.
If we use the $4.59/mo VPS as a point of comparison, just one of the servers heating up my utility room has 24x the CPU cores ($110/mo), 96x the RAM ($440/mo) and 1024x the storage ($4,700/mo).
I would never in a million years actually do so, but I'm relatively certain I could turn several dozen CPU cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space into more than $72/mo (assuming only getting 50% of the revenue) _somehow_.
The last 2 are really well solved.
It's crazy what's possible with USFF machines as mini-blade servers.
Low electricity and really serviceable redundancy and failover.
I would guess most home labs are at or near 99% availability on hardware.
Scale is part of it too. I could pack my homelab into the car and take it to a friends house. They have the space, power service, and internet to accommodate me. A full data center doesn’t have that option, at least not for free-ish.
When you can buy 4 USFFs for the price of 1 new one, and run 2 have have a test one, and one for spares I'm not really sure what everyone is concerned about.
Enterprise, engineering, industrial grade equipment is the same high quality level, be it a server or a desktop meant for extreme environments.
Too many people are only purchasers of consumer grade equipment and would be surprised at what a huge difference the corporate/engineering/industry spec stuff is like.
So go ahead, sell your space and in your SLA promise absolutely nothing and bill only for what they use.
Also have an explanation ready then the feds raid your house :)
Even renting space within a community you’re a part of, like a local makerspace, seems like a bad idea. While it would probably mitigate the worst risks, could still leave you with people dissatisfied with the level of service.
If people are honest with the service level they can offer and then i don’t see any issues really.
I wouldn’t do that, because i don’t like to deal with users, but other people might.
That’s in contrast to the centralized model where all the servers live in a set of giant concrete boxes aka data centers run by hyperscalers.
What do they do, walk into a Google datacenter and randomly yank out a 1U server that they feel like and rip out some ethernet cables? I really don't quite understand how this works.
Any good datacenter distributes everything geographically and encrypts everything.
Or, if they suspect disk encryption, they don't shut the power. Instead, they dissect the power cords to add a special UPS, so that they can move servers without powering them off...
crazy I know right?! it might just work though.
your shit isn't getting raided unless you are facilitating some horrible stuff
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombin...
Datacentres don't distribute anything, that's cloud thinking.
The person with their equipment there does.
Now, setting up one's own cloud using some of the terrific IaaS/PaaS is worth learning from on youtube to see how far it's come.
It led me down the path of imagining two data centers: one in your basement, and one in some office building with a reception area, some cubicles, etc. It seems like the former would see the government breaking down doors and yanking servers off the rack, ripping ethernet cables. The latter would probably see a phone call or perhaps a discussion with reception, followed by a security officer or something.
The suspicious workload could be the exact same in both cases, but this is one of those neat little spots where being a Real Business has massive advantages.