I have a production SaaS product, used by 1,000's a day.<p>Server bills are $1,000/month. Heroku mostly and Digital Ocean.<p>I'm thinking of moving to a home server, setting up 2 servers (a Staging + Production), with 4 raspberry PI 5's as worker servers.<p>It seems I can get far better performance, with a < 3 Month payback period...<p>What am I missing??<p>Server spec:<p>Server ->https://pcbuilder.net/rigs/4sg24H/ - $988 /each x 2
+
Raspberry PI 5 ->https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/#:~:text=Buy%20now-,Specification,-Broadcom%20BCM2712%202.4GHz - $80 /each x 4
+
Hardware Firewall -> https://www.amazon.com/Fortinet-FortiGate-Firewall-Throughput-Protection/dp/B07ZZMFWJ7/ - $350 x 1
+
Switch -> https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-5-Port-Gigabit-Ethernet-Managed/dp/B07PJ7XZ7X - $25 x 1<p>Total = $2,671 (+ time and effort to config)
+ DataDog<p>Payback < 3 months<p>Power cuts - Not had one ever. But, could spin up a server if a ping of the home server goes down
Internet disruption - Not ever happened. But would have a 5G fall back router.<p>What am I missing?? Why is this not more common?
Most residential ISPs forbid commercial use.<p>Many residential ISPs won't give you a static IPv4 address.<p>Most residential ISPs won't give you sufficiently symmetrical bandwidth.<p>VM hosting companies have spare hardware on hand, and can generally shift you either transparently or with minimal downtime to different hardware.<p>If none of these things are an issue for you, go ahead.<p>Personally, I wouldn't use RPi hardware, EVO 970s, 2TB spinners, or a Fortigate.<p>Four boxes, each with a 12 core CPU, 64 GB RAM, a 2TB NVMe with at least a 1200TBW lifetime, and a pair of 4-8 TB spinners in RAID1. One box runs staging including workers, one runs production including workers, one runs all your firewall, utility, administration and backups, and the fourth is configured and powered off -- once a month, power it up, bring it up to date, and shut it down. Someday you will need it as a spare or for capacity. Get extra NICs for all of them.<p>I would estimate $5K in hardware costs. Buy an online UPS and connect the production and utility boxes to it.
I love the spirit of this! Like other have said, moving away from Heroku to a dedicated server that's already hosted would also be a win. Even on-demand AWS EC2 instances may be cheaper than your dynos.<p>I'd personally still lean towards a service where I could get a VM or dedicated box so I could keep internet access and power off my mind. That said, installing at a colo could be a good middleground for "bring your own" hardware, but power and internet included.<p>It's hard to say without knowing the nature of your SaaS because that can dictate risk tolerance and SLAs, but I'd run the costs on what the upside is vs the potential of an issue and what the cost of those issues are.
We also moved off of Heroku, but instead of a home server, we moved to Hetzner (<a href="https://hetzner.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hetzner.com/</a>) and threw Dokku on top. Significantly cheaper than Digital Ocean (ridiculously cheaper than Heroku) and has a good reputation on HN.<p>We opted for their VPS's in Ashburn, Virginia, but you can get dedicated servers in Europe as well. Depends where your customers are.<p>You can do this a lot quicker and more reliably than trying to run your own servers from home.
Compliance, data protection? Not sure if you just don't care about these or if your service doesn't process any sensitive or personal data but having all your customer data sitting at home in your basement or living room where it can be easily stolen sounds like a nightmare, and will put you in a bad spot in case something happens. Not sure if that's relevant to you and where you're based, I would never risk that though, and I think it's quite unprofessional.
> Power cuts - Not had one ever.<p>I had both blackouts and brownouts. They're typically very short lived so why not add a little UPS to the mix?<p>Regarding the Pis: I've got both an army of Pi and now an army of NUCs. I don't know what'd work best for you.<p>Also is Gbit/s sufficient?<p>> Payback < 3 months<p>To me it's a no brainer but you could also aim for a payback in less than, say, six months and have something really smoking that $1000/month cloud offering.
Is your home internet connection fast, reliable and provide sufficient volumes? Many connections are not far slower for outgres than ingres.
Does your ISP permit the usage you propose under your current contract?
What about IP, can you get static IP, is it within the ISP's range, DNS? I doubt that dynamic DNS would suffice.
I like that you're planning on doing this. I think you'll have a good time reading these links.<p>* <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-scooter-computer/</a><p>* <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-elses-computer/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...</a><p>Pay some attention to where he mentions "burning in your box"<p>I really think minipc's are the sweet spot. I run several and they are amazing for the cost. They run circles around cpu/memory/disk io you'll get at heroku or digital ocean. The cheaper smaller minipc's will run circles around any pi as well.<p>I run a couple of morefine m600 r9 7940hs ($520) with 1TB ssd and ($100) 64GB of ram ($200). If you look for deals you can occasionally score big (usually during holidays).<p><a href="https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3747vs5454/Intel-i7-10700-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-7940HS" rel="nofollow">https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3747vs5454/Intel-i7-107...</a><p>I'd say this, if you're serving "from home" I'd make sure you've got a fiber connection and that you're not behind a nat. It's actually not expensive to get fiber and a block of public ip addresses where I live, but you should check into that.<p>Also, I would absolutely buy a ups ....actually buy 2. One specifically for your networking set up and another for your box. Cheap insurance if you ask me. I'd honestly only start off maybe hosting your staging server. Figure out what the latencies are like, how you're going to do data backups, and OS updates, etc and all the other digital lawn mowing activities first.<p>Many small businesses used to do exactly what you 're doing, but there's risk involved. I do think the sweet spot is collocation, but if you're ok with the risks have at it. You'll learn a lot and many others have done it.
My last job was working for a growing saas company and this means security questionnaires and compliance. Your home server and environment wont tick many boxes.<p>I have been running my own small saas on Hostgator then Hetzner for the last 17 years. Go for cheap cloud servers. I currently pay £20 per month for £1000mrr
How much trafic do you have daily ?<p>I guess that you can also rent dedidacted servers or VPS and it will cut the bill by a lot, even on GCP or AWS, rent VMs with committed usage are not that expensive! It could also help with security and compliance.
can you share some more information about the current setup and pricing.<p>I would definitly not go for a complete home setup - but a hybrid approach is quite feasable - eg. worker nodes, staging env and a vault hosting inhouse. but for production for me personally it would be too risky. you should also calculate your own hourly rate what it cost to maintain this setup...
You're probably better off moving to AWS or Azure, for all the reasons dsr points out.<p>You'll almost certainly still end up with significant cost savings. Plus learning how the cloud works at the base level is a valuable and transferable skill.