Thanks, yeah, there’s a lot of work for us to do in testing hardware and understanding what a common workload (if such a thing exists) would need.

Do you have any particular evidence that causes you to think the audience would be niche or wouldn’t want to pay subscriptions? I can understand if this is just an opinion you hold, but if there’s data or experience behind it, that would be good to know.

Although any commercial business will be dead or the new problem to avoid in 15 years.

This sounds like an interesting point, could you expand it a bit? Are you saying that there’s no way this kind of business will last that long, or if it does it’ll become something bad?

Would you rather pay a higher price per single instance ($100 to fix something you broke on accident) or pay a lower constant price ($10-$20/month) like insurance?

Would you rather get help in the form of a conversation, a custom script someone wrote for you, or by giving admin access to the company to directly fix things?

Do you already have an idea of what kinds of things you’d want to run on it?

What kind of workload do you run that makes you confident you need that much hardware? Do you think people just beginning could get buy on 4 cores and 8 GB RAM for a while? How long before you think most people need more?

That’s an interesting idea I hadn’t thought much about. I’ve been more focused on individuals than organizations. Do you have experience with tax-funded institutions? I assumed they generally have strict procurement rules and long support contracts with large established players by policy.

Good point, I should have mentioned the plan is to sell support.

this price point is not realistic even for used equipment, not including RAM or storage

I’m doing experiments currently on a refurbished Intel i5-6500 with 8Gb DDR4 and a 0.5Tb SSD. It’s tiny, quiet (~45 decibels) and so far runs ~8 watts idle, 25 watts normal usage. I haven’t stress-tested the power draw. The router I’m testing with is a Mikrotik hEX lite 5. That’s around ~$150, though clearly if you are accustomed to more “rack-mount” style homelab these will seem very modest.

What I’m testing for now is getting representative loads on the devices to see how they perform.

I’m not really sure what value add you are bringing to the table that one wouldn’t get from just buying used hardware from an office surplus and if one is very inexperienced in self-hostong, looking into something like LTT is partnered with like Hexos.

Oh, I totally agree, my value add just isn’t there if you are experienced at hosting. The value add is to help people get started, and to keep them running at a modest level. Not everyone wants to experiment with Kubernetes at home or train LLMs. Some folks just want a password manager, a shared calendar, something to organize their tax documents, a pihole, and a Minecraft server for their kids.

I don’t follow LTT, I was under the impression it was more hardware reviews for the experienced than tutorials to help people get started.

I’ve read a bit about Hexos, I’m thinking of some similar things, and it would make sense to work with them. I’m excited for their coming beta.

People who want the benefit of self housing without worrying about hardware will rent a vps or something simpler.

That’s certainly an option. I think of dedicated hardware as working for several different people, some of which care a great deal about not using a VPS provider because they don’t trust them with their data, or don’t trust them to be around for a long time, or don’t trust them not to raise the prices.

The hard part of hardware isn’t the purchase, it’s the maintenance.

I’m inclined to agree, but I’ve been doing hardware for a long time as a hobbyist and I sometimes forget how far I’ve come. It sounds like you might be somewhat like me in that regard. I’m often surprised when people see assembling system parts and flashing an OS as a complex, inscrutable task.

What do you see as the hard part of maintenance? Scheduling time to do it? Unexpected errors or failures?

If it came bundled around a bunch of DIY guides explaining the hows and the whys, it’d be far more appealling

Interesting, so if you got hardware and it came with guides, what kind of guides would you want? I would assume something layered. At the top is just “I want to install these 5 apps and use them, I don’t care how it works” and in the middle is “I’m ready to SSH into the router and create some VLANs for fun” at the bottom is something like “I want to flash my own firmware with appropriate certificates for secure boot and my own root chain of trust on the server hardware”.