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?
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What’s the value-add over just buying a SFF PC?
I assume “SFF PC” means “Small form-factor personal computer”.
The value add is not having to make a large number of technical decisions. IPv4 vs v6, which firewall rules to use, port-forwarding vs DMZ, flavor of Linux, partition scheme, filesystem type, application packaging system, and on and on. For many people they don’t care about these decisions, they want “to put something on the Internet” and do it safely. While safety isn’t a binary, and engineering is full of tradeoffs, an experienced practitioner can answer many of these questions reflexively and come out with good enough answers for some customers.
In the end the customer should be able to dig in and change whatever they want. But I want to see if flipping the decision dependency around will help. IE, start with stuff that works, then change things, rather than start with parts and make all the decisions before anything works.
Probably not much for people on a self hosting community, but those that want to get away from subscriptions and steal your data as a service cloud providers that might need some reassurance that they’ll have a working system.
