Niche Server Hosting most in need? reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 03:26 What is a type of niche server hosting most in need that is not currently provided... or provided well? What niche type of hosting are people struggling to find? * Super fast end-to-end encrypted file storage? * Game Servers, for a particular game or platform? (seems saturated) * Some niche type of web server? * Private email server? (seems saturated) * Video Streaming Server? (Plex seems to be nailing this) * A niche application no one seems to be hosting well? * An application that is only available on a local OS? I'm trying to identify a hosting service I can provide that, by the nature of the service, or low volume of customers, or privacy policy requirements, is not provided by the major outfits. There may be no good answer to this question and that's OK. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Senkyou · 2023-10-04 03:36 Budgeting or financial is something I've had a hard time finding something well built for. I'm sure it exists, but it's hard to find. I've heard similar complaints from others in the communities. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-04 03:47 No, you should not attempt to start your own hosting company. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 03:58 Not trying to build a hosting company, more like a community... I'd be willing to host something niche for fun or "at cost" and see where it goes if the idea was interesting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 04:00 Like an analytics engine / service? Or something that does financial computations? Did you have a particular application or API service in mind? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-04 04:13 Doesnt matter if you do it for fun, at cost, or for profit. You still need to comply with laws and regulations, and youre still responsible for things people host on your servers etc. Youre not the first with such a idea. But its a terrible idea. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 04:29 It's funny I don't recall asking any advice related to anything that you're talking about... It's interesting. Also interesting is that I have hosted many services in the past for friends and family. So thank you for your super helpful comments. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-04 04:29 Good. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AmateursPls · 2023-10-04 04:29 >You still need to comply with laws and regulations Yes, like everything you do in any industry in any society. This is a statement with zero actual substance or meaning. >youre still responsible for things people host on your servers Well that's simply not true. So long as you comply with the law as soon as breaches of what users are doing are brought to your attention, you are not responsible. How do you think ISPs, or any server companies operate? Amazon is not responsible if I host an illegal rom site on AWS, they simply have the legal obligation to terminate my services and potentially report me to the authorities if the law mandates reporting of illegal behaviour - where the hell do you even get this idea from? Or the audacity to state it as fact lmao >Youre not the first with such a idea. Another statement with zero meaning or substance. >But its a terrible idea. Sure, in your opinion. Thank god people that do rarely listen to nonsense spewed by short-sighted and unambitious thinkers as yourself or absolutely nothing would ever get done. Blimey, what a comment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- JoeB- · 2023-10-04 04:30 Jellyfin, an excellent open source alternative to Plex, just put out a call for contributors. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- thekrautboy · 2023-10-04 04:31 Oh its you again. I wont even bother to properly respond. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AmateursPls · 2023-10-04 04:33 Well I have no idea who you are or when I've interacted with you before, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it was calling you out in much the same way I just did for a similarly nonsense and baseless post? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NikStalwart · 2023-10-04 04:54 Are we talking hardware or software here? If we're talking hardware, then one thing I am missing is sane storage pricing. Most dedicated providers will charge you an absurd monthly fee for additional hard drives - you end up paying the full price of the drive in 3-4 months, and then you are basically giving free money to the hosting company beyond that point for eternity. Second hardware niche: off-site tape. You can only really get it as part of the various glacier/cold storage tiers at the big guys like AWS, GCP and Azure, nothing really standalone / small scale. Another niche: cheap / crap GPU servers. Most GPU hardware on offer is targeted at (or abused for) mining and machine learning. Something like low-end, low-cost consumer GPUs for a simple remote desktop box would be great. Fourth niche: sanely-priced Australian servers. Ha! Ha! I know that's a joke but still. If we're talking software: I don't think there is really a 'niche' per se for hosting. Most people who need something specialized will be able to host that specialized thing. But, if we're talking actual software products rather than software hosting, then: * Accounting software; * Billing software **not** based on php (I'm looking at you, WHMCS and Blesta) * Headless commenting engine (let me implement the front-end myself with handlebars, go templates or whatever) * same but for CMS/CRM/KB In general, when it comes to various website/CMS engines, there are two extremes: either the completely headless, implement-everything- yourself (strapi), or something that *technically* supports templating but includes so much crap that the code is a pain to wade through (I'm looking at you: Drupal, Joomla, and even Ghost). One of the biggest issues is when the template has to account for UI-based customizations (this is what Joomla and Ghost templates suffer from quite heavily). Something that has ***absolutely zero*** UI-based customization and is more akin to Hugo-but-with-a-backend would be great. Bonus: more providers supporting BGP sessions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Munadani · 2023-10-04 05:55 Good luck. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- AdrianTeri · 2023-10-04 10:05 Wild as I haven't seen anyone mention location location location. Specifically for gaming servers(latency) and video streaming(buffering)... Web servers to some extent also love some good latency(<200 ms). You'd have to scope your markets well(geography) which'll narrow you down to locations you'll try & lease infra/services. Services like Hetzner exist where can rent out hardware and divvy up resources but it's a volumes business which you need to stretch over long periods of time(+10-15 yrs), get into long term agreements and truly hope you're assumptions & business-model can carry on or you're ability to quickly adapt ... Examples of things likely to go against you? Today's advancements like AMD's RDNA3 mean I can play(moderate settings) some AAA games on the APU for ~700-1000 bucks. The mini pc's are screaming quick even outperforming blade servers, with lower TDP & even accelerators for media & cryptography functions. In a couple of years maybe I need 2 of them. One as my gaming PC(playing any AAA game I want) and the other hooked up on a LAN running the server ... Maybe game makers are seeing this trend and may act on it with licenses for game servers you can run on a LAN(s)? If you can do this gaming you can surely do it with video/media with prices of storage falling and in all of this you don't have to worry about network(speeds) & network quality ...maybe during syncing once or twice in a month or 3 months... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- violet-crayola · 2023-10-04 11:01 Dont do that. Write your own app, then host it. Dont just host someone else's app - there is no market ---------------------------------------------------------------------- hregibo · 2023-10-04 13:33 +9000 on BGP session offers :( ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 16:24 Great stuff! Thank you Nik. Agreed, hardware storage pricing is super expensive. That said, because I don’t have the benefits of economy of scale nor am I prepared to provide the level of redundancy / multi-site backups / ISO compliance and such, I am not likely to head down this road. If there was a market demand for something niche and required a certain level of compliance, I would definitely ramp-up accordingly. I want to say there are some cases where a customer needs a level of security and privacy that the big guys can't provide because their terms of service and policies (understandably) conflict with what the customer needs. In these cases, those customers typically just build their own solution. Affordable mid-level GPUs are definitely needed. Accounting software was mentioned by others as well. This is interesting. I believe all big providers like SAP, Oracle, and Sage offer hosted solutions, but their prices are mostly outrageous. Interesting idea. I have found it funny that, although QuickBooks has rolled out their web-based SaaS solutions, there are still many customers that prefer the desktop version and pay Right Networks for, effectively, an RDC to hosted Windows boxes. They did really well with that. I think QuickBooks acquired them. Headless commenting engine… my favorite idea… also a commenting engine hosted by a company that is a staunch supporter of free speech. Also also, all the commenting engines seem to always try to weasel in a multitude of additional revenue streams with ads and branding and such.. Annoying. It would be cool if a CMS provider had the foresight to primarily focus on the backend or just create an advanced API with a default GUI that could be customized or ignored completely by a team that just wants to create their own custom interface. Thanks again for your comments. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 16:29 Yes yes... this is an interesting and growing space... lots and lots of upfront capital requirements. Some existing CDNs are crazy when you dig into the details and look at some of their network / backbone diagrams... crazy. Wouldn't it be great if there was a huge Manhattan style project to just flood the entire country with fiber networks :) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 16:29 Thanks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-04 16:31 Yes yes... that would be ideal and quite different b/c the app would be the service and not the hosting itself. I'm working on an API service at the moment... could be interesting TBD. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CrowdSens · 2023-10-04 17:28 Yes yes... don't try anything, don't have fun, don't spin up a server to test a market, don't spin up a server because it would be a great learning experience if you haven't done it before, don't do anything! Ha! Great advice guy, not to mention that's not what he was asking. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- devutils · 2023-10-04 21:15 >Dont do that. Write your own app, then host it. Dont just host someone else's app - there is no market Well, AWS and Elasticache would like to tell you a story. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TBT_TBT · 2023-10-04 21:57 I would appreciate a hosting services where one could create a docker- compose (e.g. in a web editor of the service) and just run it. As long as the container runs, the service is paid. If it is stopped, less (only the storage) is paid. Just containers, no need to care about the underlying hardware (raid ofc),,ips or anything. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- violet-crayola · 2023-10-04 22:07 I'm not following. If OP is planning to start aws rival and has funding - by all means scratch everything I said. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- bsncubed · 2023-10-04 22:18 Have a look at https://www.binarylane.com.au/ for a good Australian vps ---------------------------------------------------------------------- devutils · 2023-10-04 22:44 >Dont do that. Write your own app, then host it. All I wanted to say that I both agree/disagree. In most practical cases it's better to write your own app, but from a business point of view if you don't need to write an app it's even better as you save time. The challenge is if you have enough expertise to "host" someone else's app, something that you would automatically get whilst building your own app. There are many projects where authors, often students built great software, but don't have enough time, funding to actually provide reliable hosted version. You don't need the AWS's budget, but you need enough to register a company, hire a lawyer, rent some servers. Nothing big, but way too much for a student or someone overworked paying their mortgage. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NikStalwart · 2023-10-05 00:50 Had a poke, thanks for the suggestion. Their dedi prices are eyewatering for what they are, you can get comparable (and cheaper) with OVH or if you colocate yourself. VPS are *acceptable* for the first two offers, and then it quickly leaves the realm of acceptability IMO. But that's Australian electricity + land prices for you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ElevenNotes · 2023-10-05 05:25 **Blockchain**. Prohibited by most VPS and dedicated server providers. I’m a cloud provider myself, if you need some info, just ask. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- jdove78 · 2023-10-07 04:38 >docker-compose I wonder the level of demand for this. May be interesting to put it out there and test the demand.