[HN Gopher] Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)
___________________________________________________________________
Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)
Author : Wingy
Score : 89 points
Date : 2025-04-13 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grumpy.systems)
(TXT) w3m dump (grumpy.systems)
| tecleandor wrote:
| Well, can't read the article cos' there's a soccer match right
| now, and the head of the Spanish league, along with Telefonica,
| have decided that anyone behind Cloudflare and some other CDNs
| and hosts are guilty of pirating the TV signal. No reading this
| afternoon.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/DCiE4J0
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Yeah, I saw an article about that yesterday:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666033
| tecleandor wrote:
| He appeared on and interview a couple weeks ago saying the
| cuts were only affecting pirates and freaks. So...
|
| Edit: by "he" I mean Javier Tebas.
| encom wrote:
| I know this isn't their fault, but this perfectly illustrates
| why having CloudFlare gatekeep the internet wasn't great idea.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Half of CloudFlare's MO is just "if we gatekeep the entire
| Internet, then nobody will be able to censor a single site,
| because then they'll be censoring the _entire Internet_ ".
|
| 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.
| newsclues wrote:
| Don't need cloudflare to pirate content, if people nerf the
| internet out of fear of piracy, the pirates need to make
| that content so available to all for free with a superior
| UI/UX so that the censors give up and cease.
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| Ironically, _I_ can 't see _your_ image because Imgur assumes
| my VPN is malicious and rejects traffic from it. (Instead of
| saying this, it lies about being over capacity. This situation
| mysteriously resolves when I disable the VPN.)
|
| https://ibb.co/F4nG3LYL
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| When NVidia released GPUs a generation or two ago (RTX 3000 or
| 4000), I remember someone on here had got the highest end model,
| and asking how they could rent it out for AI workloads. I'm
| favoriting this just so I can pull it out quickly, should I ever
| come across such nonsense again.
| morkalork wrote:
| There was an interesting post here by a young developer making
| use of "home gpu pool" service for some ai work and it didn't
| look so bad. Slow, but very cost effective compared to the big
| cloud providers.
| LPisGood wrote:
| 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
| doubled112 wrote:
| 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.
| servercobra wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| 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.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I know of a few "serious" businesses doing this to scrape sites
| (mostly pricing data) via consumer IP blocks.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You can get residential proxies as an alternative, but it's
| pretty expensive.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| 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 $1.84 per GB when purchased in
| bulk."
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| Yeah but if you're just scraping it's only a kb or 2 per
| request. Once or twice a day to check the price of an
| item would let you track thousands of items for years for
| just 8$
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| 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.
| faizshah wrote:
| 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
| bdcravens wrote:
| 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.
| faizshah wrote:
| 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.
| gruez wrote:
| >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?
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| elevation wrote:
| > 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?
| booder1 wrote:
| You can easily pull that with a single server if you put some
| GPUs in there. See vast.ai
| fragmede wrote:
| reading reddit about that sounds like that's not feasible
| photonthug wrote:
| 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.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > 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.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| > Feds have raided datacenters and taken servers
|
| 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.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| You're thinking too big. "Normal size datacenters" is a small
| industrial building with 20 racks. And yes, they walk in, shut
| the power and start hauling drives. No joke.
| nbernard wrote:
| > they walk in, shut the power and start hauling drives.
|
| 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...
| dheera wrote:
| OK, so you have a special power supply that shuts off power
| to the system if it detects that its GPS location moved?
| wutwutwat wrote:
| or, and hear me out here... you don't do fucked up shit
| that would require such engineering to hide your
| activity.
|
| crazy I know right?! it might just work though.
|
| your shit isn't getting raided unless you are
| facilitating some horrible stuff
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| Block of thermite and a gyroscope? But perhaps it's still
| best to just... not mass seed linux ISOs for others.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Reminds me of John Birges's famous contraption [0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hote
| l_bombin...
| eightysixfour wrote:
| Some people still rent physical servers or even, shockingly,
| colocate their own boxes!
| 100pctremote wrote:
| Datacenters retail space, power, and cooling -- sometimes
| bandwidth. Data privacy is up to the tenant, but datacenters
| have a process just like any ISP to facilitate the execution of
| legal warrants.
| j45 wrote:
| It's how it can work - I suggest you go read some articles on
| how this goes down and how much encryption does or doesn't
| help.
|
| 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.
| LPisGood wrote:
| I was wondering that myself.
|
| 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.
| Integer wrote:
| That's exactly how it works in Russia. This led to some
| innovative services and exotic contermeasures, like locating
| the datacentres inside the perimeter of military factories
| (hard for LEOs to breach unnoticed), or installing racks inside
| trucks - you have time to drive them out of a nearby building
| while the front doors are breached.
| munchler wrote:
| I've been renting compute by the hour on Vast.ai and often wonder
| about the servers I use. Is it reasonable to assume that any such
| server with, say, a 90+% reliability rating is in a data center,
| rather than someone's basement?
| j45 wrote:
| Not really, the equipment is the main point of failure. Then
| maybe the connection and power, and environment (cooling)
|
| 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.
| everforward wrote:
| This. 90% gives surprisingly large error budgets; that's
| about 72 hours of downtime a month or 36.5 days a year.
|
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Haha, thanks.
|
| 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.
| omneity wrote:
| vast.ai have two kinds of servers, what they call "datacenter"
| and regular ones. Datacenter servers seem to have better
| internet and a contractual agreement with vast.ai, probably the
| distinction you're looking for.
| solardev wrote:
| It seems like most of those issues could be solved with a
| distributed orchestration layer, the same kind used to power
| SETI@home, BOINC, crypto mining, RC5 decryption back in the day,
| etc. E.g. if the administration of billing, compute, and storage
| were decentralized and each home node could drop in and drop out
| as necessary.
|
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| The economics simply don't work. Add up hardware, ongoing
| maintenance, electricity and ISP costs, and then the cut that
| the middleman will take (realistically 30-50%, probably more),
| and there's no reality where you can compete with a $4/month
| VPS from Hetzner.
| solardev wrote:
| Not on reliability, sure, but compute?
| actuallyalys wrote:
| Sure, but AWS has human customer support and engineers
| overseeing all that (not to mention accountants and lawyers).
| neilv wrote:
| > _Scary Stuff_
|
| 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".
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I think that in general, "I should use my hobby to generate
| income" is a bad idea. Once you start trying to generate income,
| it's not a hobby any more, it's a business. And businesses have a
| lot of not very fun pieces that you have to account for (as the
| author here indicates). Some people find they like it... but to
| me, there's no faster way to suck the joy out of a hobby than to
| turn it into a business.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| The only way I could see this not ending badly is if you're
| renting space for your friends. Presumably you would be selling
| whatever you're renting at cost.
|
| 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.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| The internet, as a network of peers, is basically illegal.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| IMO, this is a side effect from centralization under the name
| of security/convenience. We deserve the Internet we have today
| because the majority of folks don't want to learn and prefer
| digital nanny states and walled gardens.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| You lost me at 'We deserve'. My enemies have not defeated me
| enough that I think I should deserve to be oppressed.
| ipython wrote:
| That's not what this article is about, though. He's not arguing
| that you cannot host _your own_ content. He's arguing that you
| shouldn't _sell_ your excess capacity to randoms on the
| internet for reasons enumerated in tfa.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| What are you a peer of if not the content of others? Hosting
| your own content is a client-server model.
| ipython wrote:
| Not sure what you mean here. In the "traditional" internet
| peer to peer model from the early days, it was always a
| client-server model. Just that everyone "ran their own
| server". For example: You want to send me email? Great my
| smtp server is sitting at my desk and the mail spool lives
| on my local hard drive.
|
| 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.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| Does your comment above belong on my server your server
| or HN server? The traditional internet is based on telnet
| into servers (at say a university) it is fundamentally
| not peer to peer. The peers in the traditional internet
| would be mainframes to mainframes. Im sure they stored
| replicated content.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Downsize - I know it's hard to talk about, but if your quad
| CPU, 2TB RAM monster can't run because it's too expensive and you
| need the money, get something smaller that's better suited for
| your workloads._
|
| 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.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Same here - $5 a month for a vps with public IP is a bargain. I
| could even use it to tunnel larger transfers, like accessing my
| local media server behind a NAT. That said, it's definitely not
| as cool as running loud, beefy servers.
| phyzome wrote:
| I run all my stuff off a 15+ year old laptop someone threw out.
|
| Start there. :-)
| ohgr wrote:
| Slightly newer one here (Lenovo T470). The battery still
| works so it's got a built in UPS. KVM comes with it too!
|
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| This was something I considered very recently (when I
| realized my only remaining VGA monitor didn't support the
| oddball frequency put out by an old Supermicro server on
| which I was still running something important).
|
| 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.)
| 3oil3 wrote:
| I wonder if the peps that do sell space of their homelab have a
| significant impact on the sales of that hosting company the
| author mentions he works for.
| devrandoom wrote:
| The article is on point but assumes that you're providing service
| level agreement that you can't honour.
|
| 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 :)
| rdegges wrote:
| I have a decently-sized homelab and I've been renting out unused
| disk space. I actually allocated 20TB of disk space (RAID 1) and
| have been renting the space out via the Storj network
| (https://www.storj.io).
|
| 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.
| jononor wrote:
| This is on of the few cases that makes sense. Does not even
| money, but at least reduced cost one something one presumably
| already would have had.
|
| Is there anything similar for compute?
| rdegges wrote:
| I'm not aware of any!
| a3FgH9Lp wrote:
| Solid points on the unintended liabilities of hosting others'
| services. The cost breakdown is eye-opening - hardware
| depreciation alone makes most co-lo agreements unprofitable at
| small scale. Better to focus on your own projects or contribute
| to established organizations with proper infrastructure.
| znpy wrote:
| The author says they don't want to gatekeep and then essentially
| proceeds to gatekeep.
|
| 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.
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| A lot of this is correct if you're renting servers or something
| like that, but what a lot of people in those subs seem to end up
| doing is renting their storage via services like Storj or Sia,
| their GPUs to services like NiceHash, and so on. Users don't
| visit their network directly, user data is small parts of files
| (encrypted), there's no need for public IPs, etc. The risks are
| much smaller.
| bananapub wrote:
| It is incredibly sad how so many people these days are unwilling
| to just have a hobby. Not a way to make money, not a way to
| advance your career, not a scam, just a thing you do that you
| enjoy and get better at over time.
| ohgr wrote:
| From direct experience the moment someone gets to live on your
| kit, there's going to be porn on it. A contract job I had a
| number of years ago was to undo the _"I sold someone a slice of
| my colo box and it went badly"_ problem.
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