Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)
106 comments
·April 13, 2025LPisGood
jodrellblank
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.
doubled112
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
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.
wink
Just getting people to pay their domain fees on time (or at all) was a nightmare back then - so nowadays there's only one deal on infrastructure I own:
It's free and comes with no guarantees. If you need a domain or subdomain, you own it, pay for it, and just put a DNS record to the IP I tell you.
candiddevmike
I know of a few "serious" businesses doing this to scrape sites (mostly pricing data) via consumer IP blocks.
bdcravens
You can get residential proxies as an alternative, but it's pretty expensive.
faizshah
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
hsuduebc2
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."
paxys
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.
photonthug
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
> 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.
elevation
> 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
You can easily pull that with a single server if you put some GPUs in there. See vast.ai
fragmede
reading reddit about that sounds like that's not feasible
xboxnolifes
Hosting a few higher CPU requirement video game servers would put you there. Something like 2 dedicated cores, 8-16GB RAM, and 100-200GB Disk for $30/mo.
lostmsu
We make a service like that: https://borg.games/setup
The target is $100/m per RTX 3090.
benley
How does that compare to the typical cost of electricity to power a 3090 for a month? I honestly have no idea, this isn't a gotcha question.
j45
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.
tecleandor
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.
ClearAndPresent
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.)
VoidWhisperer
403 would also be a weird error code for over capacity - 503 would be the correct error code.. The fact that it returns 403 as the error code is more proof that it isn't just 'service being over capacity'.
theandrewbailey
Yeah, I saw an article about that yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43666033
tecleandor
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
I know this isn't their fault, but this perfectly illustrates why having CloudFlare gatekeep the internet wasn't great idea.
kmeisthax
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
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.
rdegges
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.
omoikane
A lot of the article can be generalized to "don't run a business in your home". It sounds like in this case, Storj is the one running the business while you are a customer (paying with storage), so you are shielded from a lot of the risks mentioned in the article.
By the way, I can't find the exact plan you described on the storj.io site, but there is this page that mentions STORJ tokens, so now I am confused as to whether this is a cryptocurrency thing or not.
https://storj.dev/support/account-management-billing/payment...
ac29
> A lot of the article can be generalized to "don't run a business in your home". It sounds like in this case, Storj is the one running the business while you are a customer (paying with storage), so you are shielded from a lot of the risks mentioned in the article.
If you make any income (even $1), you still have to report it on your taxes though. You might or might not be obligated to do all the other business-y stuff, but I dont think "paying with storage" gets you off the hook for taxes if you are also getting paid for storage.
nighthawk454
It’s an option for payment. Detailed on the same link:
> Storj created the STORJ utility token as a medium of exchange on its decentralized cloud storage network. The STORJ utility token facilitates payments from people around the world for their use of the Storj network to store their data, and Storj uses it to pay our community of Storage Node Operators that rent their unused hard drive capacity and bandwidth to the network.
jononor
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?
3np
iExec? https://docs.iex.ec/
Don't know if Golem is still around but they were/are doing something like that to commoditize GPU.
As with anything crypto there's a fractal of vaporware but at least those two had/have something.
Havoc
Closest I can think of is the sheepit render farm. Thats blender specific though not generic compute
lostmsu
We make a service like that: https://borg.games/setup
rdegges
I’m not aware of any!
bigstrat2003
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.
celsoazevedo
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.
neilv
> 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".
neilv
> 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.
phyzome
I run all my stuff off a 15+ year old laptop someone threw out.
Start there. :-)
neilv
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.)
lantry
I use a few old laptops like this, but I opted to remove the batteries due to the risk of spicy pillow.
The benefits of the "built in UPS" didn't seem worth it to me because if my power is out, my internet is down anyway, and I don't run anything that needs that much uptime anyway.
wltr
What about laptops with broken screens? Solves the overheat issue and potential robbers too, more likely.
chneu
Been using old laptops since HS. Remove the suspend on lid close and throw that thing in a closet.
You can always find free/cheap laptops.
ohgr
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.
hsuduebc2
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.
a3FgH9Lp
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.
solardev
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
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.
nucleardog
We're not talking starting up a hosting company but renting idle capacity. I'm already paying for the hardware, maintenance, electricity, and connectivity.
The only real marginal cost to renting some of my idle capacity would be additional power use. Versus current draw, the power supply running maxed out 24/7 would increase my power bill by $36/mo.
If we use the $4.59/mo VPS as a point of comparison, just one of the servers heating up my utility room has 24x the CPU cores ($110/mo), 96x the RAM ($440/mo) and 1024x the storage ($4,700/mo).
I would never in a million years actually do so, but I'm relatively certain I could turn several dozen CPU cores, hundreds of GB of RAM, and terabytes of disk space into more than $72/mo (assuming only getting 50% of the revenue) _somehow_.
lostmsu
VPS maybe not, but GPU servers are very viable (we built one).
solardev
Not on reliability, sure, but compute?
actuallyalys
Sure, but AWS has human customer support and engineers overseeing all that (not to mention accountants and lawyers).
munchler
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?
omneity
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.
nfriedly
Eh, the server in my basement hits one 9 of reliability. Maybe even two!
j45
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
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
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.
theandrewbailey
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
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.
devrandoom
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 :)
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