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Comment by LPisGood | Hacker News Reader

Selling compute that is on my home network using storage that resides at my house and networking that leads back to where I live to random internet people sounds like a nightmare that cannot possibly be worth the few hundred bucks a month it may earn you.

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

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I have some friends with Nextcloud accounts that run on my home server, and a couple have accounts on my Matrix home server.

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.

My friends have offered to pay for some of the hard drives, but I refuse because once I accept money, there's an implicit owing them to keep it up (whether that's real or in my head). Now it's just a best effort, and I prefer that over a couple hundred bucks.

Just getting people to pay their domain fees on time (or at all) was a nightmare back then - so nowadays there's only one deal on infrastructure I own:

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.

Not even Amateur hobbyists; they will tend to break down into:

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.

It's less about coming back to a "home", and more about self-hosting.

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.

I know of a few "serious" businesses doing this to scrape sites (mostly pricing data) via consumer IP blocks.

You can get residential proxies as an alternative, but it's pretty expensive.

Damnit I didn't even knew this existed with such insane pricing.

"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."

Yeah but if you’re just scraping it’s only a kb or 2 per request. Once or twice a day to check the price of an item would let you track thousands of items for years for just 8$

Depends on the site. Some sites are sending down several megabytes of Javascript or images per request. Some sites even send down massive JSON payloads to page through instead of doing it iteratively.

Exactly. Or if you decide just to scrape whole thing with headless browsers. It would be ridicilously expensive.

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.

It’s not really that expensive, I guess it depends on your use case but it’s only like $4/GB (edit: misleading, see replies): https://oxylabs.io/products/residential-proxy-pool or https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies

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

Providers like Oxylabs can be quite restrictive, preventing access to many of the common sites that scrapers choose to target.

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.

Hmm that’s unfortunate. I’m actually scaling up a data journalism project this month which is why I’ve been looking at these.

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.

>Providers like Oxylabs can be quite restrictive, preventing access to many of the common sites that scrapers choose to target.

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?

I used the term "scrapers" pretty loosely, but yes, in many cases they are more bad actors than actual scrapers. However as they say the list may include other sites, I suspect Oxylab adds sites to the list at the site owners' requests (Amazon, Target, etc are likely to be on those lists)

US court says Brightdata's web scraping service can be used to scrape Facebook:

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/me...

I don't even see the market for 1, because amateur hobbyists will either (1) host their own server, because that's kinda the point of the hobby, or (2) go for a large commercial host like Hetzner, Digital Ocean, Linode or any of the other dozens of business-grade options that are available for <$5-10/month.

Renting parts of a homelab sounds just as strange as renting out the extra space in your family’s refrigerator, at least at first. But thinking about it more.. internet speed/cost in much of America is insane compared to Europe, and depending on what you’re trying to do with the bandwidth it’s not like you can actually address that with cloud, where the free tier is almost useless but above the free tier it’s hard to do much without quickly getting into significant expense.

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.

> internet speed/cost in much of America is insane compared to Europe

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.

I have 8/2.5 Gbps for slightly less than half of this price.

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 :)

Is this typical in Europe? If so, that sounds great. Years ago I heard from British friends that it was more expensive and slower. Like the United States, Europe is a big place!

> a few hundred bucks a month

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?

You can easily pull that with a single server if you put some GPUs in there. See vast.ai

reading reddit about that sounds like that's not feasible

Hosting a few higher CPU requirement video game servers would put you there. Something like 2 dedicated cores, 8-16GB RAM, and 100-200GB Disk for $30/mo.

We make a service like that: https://borg.games/setup

The target is $100/m per RTX 3090.

How does that compare to the typical cost of electricity to power a 3090 for a month? I honestly have no idea, this isn't a gotcha question.

At $0.14/kWh and 250w power limit (that I'd recommend to avoid noise) it would be ~$25/m

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