Home hosted servers worth it? (i'm noob)

[Tea]

Hello everyone sorry if i say something stupid i am a noob but i found servers on ebay with lots ram and i am debating buying them and renting them out to people but i want to know if its worth it in the long run and if anyone else is doing this what issues have they ran into and what should i expect.

 

the server specs :

 

Cpu : 2x Xeon E5620 Quad Core 2.40 GHz

Ram :  48gb ddr3

Psu : 2x Hot Swap PSU

Hard Drive : 1tb

HP Smart Array P410i ZM Controller

[SpaceGhostC2C]

If you bring a server home with the intention to rent it out, you'll need to consider:

 

- your home internet connection, especially on the upstream side of things

- its power consumption and your electricity costs

- your ability to provide redundancy or any reliability guarantee at all

 

You can have a home server if you have a personal use for it, but to make a small business out of it is largely impractical.

[Tea]

2 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

If you bring a server home with the intention to rent it out, you'll need to consider:

 

- your home internet connection, especially on the upstream side of things

- its power consumption and your electricity costs

- your ability to provide redundancy or any reliability guarantee at all

 

You can have a home server if you have a personal use for it, but to make a small business out of it is largely impractical.

I have taken electricity costs in mind already i think i should be okay that side but internet wise i didn't even think that and i was thinking making a tos but i guess those 2 are useless without doing something about my internet connection

[Dark]

I'd be curious about how much you are asking for 'rent' and who you are marketing to.

[Not_Sean]

My question is let's say I rent this server What can I do with it, like what are you providing?

 

If its straight storage it will always be cheaper for me to go through Dropbox, or one drive or hell there is tons of others. 

 

Like what are you offering me as a home user and why would I go with you? 

[leadeater]

What security do you offer? What service guarantee are you giving? Do you have a registered business? Do you have liability insurance? 

[Tea]

1 hour ago, Not_Sean said:

My question is let's say I rent this server What can I do with it, like what are you providing?

 

If its straight storage it will always be cheaper for me to go through Dropbox, or one drive or hell there is tons of others. 

 

Like what are you offering me as a home user and why would I go with you? 

i planned on renting it out as a vps so you can install stuff on it and host game servers ect 

[Tea]

2 hours ago, Dark said:

I'd be curious about how much you are asking for 'rent' and who you are marketing to.

Well rent wise i was planning on going cheap just because not really in need money that bad atm and people i plan on selling it to are people that want to host game servers or just store files and do other things like they would do on a vps

[Tea]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

What security do you offer? What service guarantee are you giving? Do you have a registered business? Do you have liability insurance? 

have not thought over these things yet happy you brought them up i only recently thought doing this and once i am 100% sure what i want to do with it and have answered all these questions then i will of course go thru with renting it out

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Tea said:

Well rent wise i was planning on going cheap just because not really in need money that bad atm and people i plan on selling it to are people that want to host game servers or just store files and do other things like they would do on a vps

The first thing you need to look at is your target market: who are you looking to sell to and how much are they willing to pay?

 

This is unfortunately a really really hard space to target as the market is already highly saturated with very cheap options:

• OVH
• CreeperHost
• Dacentec

Not to mention Azure, AWS, SoftLayer and Google services. I even saw another member mention the other day he's paying about $4.50 US a month for 1vCPU, 2GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.

 

I don't want to get your hopes down however there are a heap of other things (not mentioned above) to think about:

• Support desk; what level of support do you plan to provide?
• Provisioning; do you just give them an IPv4 address and say go for your life?
• Backups; do you offer backups / guarantees of data availibility in the event of a hardware failure?

 

[Tea]

4 hours ago, Windspeed36 said:

The first thing you need to look at is your target market: who are you looking to sell to and how much are they willing to pay?

 

This is unfortunately a really really hard space to target as the market is already highly saturated with very cheap options:

• OVH
• CreeperHost
• Dacentec

Not to mention Azure, AWS, SoftLayer and Google services. I even saw another member mention the other day he's paying about $4.50 US a month for 1vCPU, 2GB of RAM and 10GB of disk space.

 

I don't want to get your hopes down however there are a heap of other things (not mentioned above) to think about:

• Support desk; what level of support do you plan to provide?
• Provisioning; do you just give them an IPv4 address and say go for your life?
• Backups; do you offer backups / guarantees of data availibility in the event of a hardware failure?

 

i will offer 24/7 support and i didn't even think of a hardware failure but i will back up there files and everything they have each day to make sure they don't lose it 

[leadeater]

15 hours ago, Tea said:

but i will back up there files and everything they have each day to make sure they don't lose it 

This is normally a separate service charged at a higher rate than standard storage. I'd advise you not to offer it and only offer resiliency, but as far as data protection/backup leave that to customers. If you actually offer backup services you're going to need a lot of storage, very significant amount depending on how many restore points you offer or let customers configure. 

[flaminarrowz]

What is your internet speed? Down/Up? Customers may want at least a certain amount, for instance if I wanted to host a OpenVPN server to tunnel all my traffic with your service, I would like to know the guaranteed speed I would get.

 

What kind of network security do you have? Is it literally just your router or do you have a separate properly configured firewall with rules etc?

 

Who has access to the building? If you're running this kind of service from your house, I as a customer don't want your brother/dad/friend walking in and tampering with the server/my data.

 

How do you plan on separating different customers? Obviously all of your customers can't be able to see each others' data.

 

What happens if the power / internet goes out? Do you pay your customers back? Do you have some time period where you know you can get their services online again?

 

Data security? How do you stop someone / yourself from reading other people's data?

 

Just a few questions I have. Hope this gets your mind running about this. There's alot more than just buying a server. Best of luck.

[Tea]

10 hours ago, flaminarrowz said:

What is your internet speed? Down/Up? Customers may want at least a certain amount, for instance if I wanted to host a OpenVPN server to tunnel all my traffic with your service, I would like to know the guaranteed speed I would get.

 

What kind of network security do you have? Is it literally just your router or do you have a separate properly configured firewall with rules etc?

 

Who has access to the building? If you're running this kind of service from your house, I as a customer don't want your brother/dad/friend walking in and tampering with the server/my data.

 

How do you plan on separating different customers? Obviously all of your customers can't be able to see each others' data.

 

What happens if the power / internet goes out? Do you pay your customers back? Do you have some time period where you know you can get their services online again?

 

Data security? How do you stop someone / yourself from reading other people's data?

 

Just a few questions I have. Hope this gets your mind running about this. There's alot more than just buying a server. Best of luck.

180 download 11 upload

 

only i have access 

 

and still thinking about other 3

[flaminarrowz]

1 hour ago, Tea said:

180 download 11 upload

 

only i have access 

 

and still thinking about other 3

11 Upload is far too little. Even if you dedicated it all to one client it would be too little.

 

Keep in mind, when the/a client downloads something from the server it uses your upload speed. Personally I wouldn't even consider hosting anything public without at least 300/300. That way if you have 5 clients you could give each one a 60/60 link which is acceptable.

[AshleyAshes]

ITT: Starting a business while knowing nothing about that business isn't such a hot idea.

[KirbyTech]

You can not compete on price with such little scale. You need to have a good value proposition or millions of dollars to get started. Seems you have neither, time to rethink this idea and come up with the why your customers would choose you over the next service with more features and established record. I can't see you doing well at this idea, probably best to just kill it now or go find someone with some money then someone with skills and get the skilled guy working for you using angel funds. 

[HKG]

If you are unable to determine if a server is worth it, you do not have enough experience to be renting out servers. People need to know that if the server fails, their data will be available and that it will be up 24/7 with little to no downtime.

[Pixel5]

On 10.1.2018 at 6:43 PM, Tea said:

180 download 11 upload

 

this alone already makes this plan impossible.

 

you will need at least 100mbit/s upload and a static ip that you could give to the person that is renting from you.

[dalekphalm]

On 1/8/2018 at 11:08 AM, Tea said:

i will offer 24/7 support and i didn't even think of a hardware failure but i will back up there files and everything they have each day to make sure they don't lose it 

How are you going to offer 24/7 support, when you will be the only one with access?

 

What are you going to do if every day for 3 weeks straight, you get a support call at 4 am? Ignore it? Wake up and lose half a night's worth of sleep?

[Jarsky]

I used to sell "game servers", its not worth it unless you're selling on a large scale....

[aezakmi]

you'll need LAN upload speeds and unlimited cap to make it work and that costs a lot

[Jarsky]

13 minutes ago, aezakmi said:

you'll need LAN upload speeds and unlimited cap to make it work and that costs a lot

that depends where he is.

We have unlimited gigabit fiber in NZ for NZ$130/m (US$95)

[dalekphalm]

Just now, Jarsky said:

that depends where he is.

We have unlimited gigabit fiber in NZ for NZ$130/m (US$95)

Sure but at that price, that's 100% gonna be residential ISP. That means residential SLA, which means outages and downtime can happen more frequently (even with a good ISP).

 

Commercial Gigabit Internet - even in NZ, would no doubt cost a lot more.

 

For example:

 

We have 100/100 Fibre (true fibre) at work. It costs over $1000 per month. But that's because their SLA guarantees uptime that a Residential ISP would never guarantee. And they will send a technician out within 4 hours if there's a line issue.

[leadeater]

58 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Sure but at that price, that's 100% gonna be residential ISP. That means residential SLA, which means outages and downtime can happen more frequently (even with a good ISP).

 

Commercial Gigabit Internet - even in NZ, would no doubt cost a lot more.

 

For example:

 

We have 100/100 Fibre (true fibre) at work. It costs over $1000 per month. But that's because their SLA guarantees uptime that a Residential ISP would never guarantee. And they will send a technician out within 4 hours if there's a line issue.

Faults are very rare here.

 

Also I pay $169/m for Business 100/100 + /29 IPv4. For 950/450 it would be $50 more, all prices NZD.

 

Edit:

What your work has is a step above mine, dedicated Fibre. That's $595/m NZD for 100/100 with my ISP.