Don't sell space in your homelab (2023)

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.<p>To wit, no serious business would use your services, so your market is pretty much limited to:<p>1.) Amateur hobbyists (very little money there)<p>2.) People with Bad Intentions (horrendous from a legal and security perspective, and ethics if that’s your thing)<p>3.) People in your social circle

Well, can&#x27;t read the article cos&#x27; there&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;DCiE4J0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;DCiE4J0</a>

I have a decently-sized homelab and I&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.storj.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.storj.io</a>).<p>If you haven&#x27;t heard of it, Storj is essentially a distributed S3 that&#x27;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.<p>In my case, I back up my family photos&#x2F;videos&#x2F;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&#x27;m not making a ton of money or anything, but it&#x27;s enough to pay for my own backups and that&#x27;s a great deal.<p>If you&#x27;re looking to do what the OP is talking about in a simple way, this is by far the best way I&#x27;ve found to do it.

I think that in general, &quot;I should use my hobby to generate income&quot; is a bad idea. Once you start trying to generate income, it&#x27;s not a hobby any more, it&#x27;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&#x27;s no faster way to suck the joy out of a hobby than to turn it into a business.

A lot of this is correct if you&#x27;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&#x27;t visit their network directly, user data is small parts of files (encrypted), there&#x27;s no need for public IPs, etc. The risks are much smaller.

&gt; <i>Scary Stuff</i><p>Also, things that aren&#x27;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 &quot;cyber&quot; with impunity.<p>&gt; <i>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.</i><p>Back before the term &quot;homelab&quot;, 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.<p>Turns out friend&#x27;s server also hosted some kind of political dissent Web site. My friend is a great friend, but he probably didn&#x27;t realize he might&#x27;ve been &quot;getting me on a list&quot;.

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>A lot of homelabs start with free discarded enterprise gear from work, which turns out to be both power-hungry and loud.<p>I ended up buying Atom servers for awhile, and modding them to be even quieter.<p>Then, recently, I offloaded all 24&#x2F;7 stuff to cloud servers&#x2F;services.

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.<p>AWS itself has nodes that can be preempted by higher paying users, no, with barely a few seconds to shut down your workflows?<p>You shouldn&#x27;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.

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?

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&#x27;m favoriting this just so I can pull it out quickly, should I ever come across such nonsense again.

The article is on point but assumes that you&#x27;re providing service level agreement that you can&#x27;t honour.<p>So go ahead, sell your space and in your SLA promise absolutely nothing and bill only for what they use.<p>Also have an explanation ready then the feds raid your house :)

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>“I sold someone a slice of my colo box and it went badly”</i> problem.

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.<p>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.

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.

It&#x27;s almost like the cloud isn&#x27;t just &quot;someone else&#x27;s computer&quot; but perhaps a dedicated setup that allows for shared compute and storage managed by a dedicated team of people.

The author says they don’t want to gatekeep and then essentially proceeds to gatekeep.<p>If people are honest with the service level they can offer and then i don’t see any issues really.<p>I wouldn’t do that, because i don’t like to deal with users, but other people might.

The internet, as a network of peers, is basically illegal.

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.

&gt; Feds have raided datacenters and taken servers<p>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&#x27;t quite understand how this works.<p>Any <i>good</i> datacenter distributes everything geographically and encrypts everything.