this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
121 points (93.5% liked)

Selfhosted

40359 readers
273 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm considering a business plan for people getting in to self-hosting. Essentially I sell you a Mikrotik router and a refurbished tiny x86 server. 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.

The hypothesis is that $150 of equipment to avoid dozens of hours of software configuration is a worthwhile trade for some customers. I realize some people want to learn particular technologies and this is a bad fit for them. I think there are people out there that want the benefit of self-hosting, and may find it worth it to buy "self-hosting in a box".

What do you think? Would this be a useful product for some people?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mspencer712@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

Thank you for your reply, but to be clear, I’m not looking for individual details to be spelled out in comments. What you said is absolutely correct, thoughtful, and very helpful. But emotions are running a little high and I’m worried I’ll accidentally lash out at someone for helping. Apologies in advance.

But do you have any links? Beyond just the general subjects of security architecture, secure design, threat modeling, and attack surface identification, I’d love to see this hypothetical “generic VM and web application housing provider in a box” come with a reasonably secure default architecture. Not what you’re running, but how you’re running it.

Like, imagine decades in the future, internet historians uncover documentation and backups from a successful generic hosting company. They don’t necessarily care what their customers are hosting, their job is to make sure a breach in one customer’s stuff doesn’t impact any other customer. The documentation describes what policies and practices they used for networking, storage, compute, etc. They paid some expensive employees to come up with this and maintain it, it was their competitive advantage, so they guarded it jealously.

I’d want to see that, but (a) a public, community project and (b) now, while it’s still useful and relevant to emulate it in one’s own homelab.

If I can get some of that sweet, sweet dopamine from others liking the idea and wishing for my success, maybe I can build my own first version of it, publish my flawed version, and it can get feedback.